Lens: Voigtlander color-skopar 35mm f2.5
Camera: NEX-7, ISO200, f5.6, 1/80, raw
A beautiful sunset of a beautiful day of a beautiful Autumn, in a beautiful park with a beautiful girl and her beautiful pregnancy. The place is the magical Villa Doria Pamphili, and girl, who’s well entered into her ninth and last month of pregnancy, is Annarosa. Very soon her husband Marco and she are going to meet with Carlo, their firstborn. They are now in that weird moment in which they can’t wait any more to finally start being a family, but they fear what has to happen first, that is, the labor and child delivery.
Annarosa, especially, is living an incredible transition. Before she was a girl, soon she’ll be a mother, right now she’s this magical and mythological being that, solely, is able to take her lover attributes, mix it with hers, and generate a new human being, a propagation of their love and their existence, a new soul, a new mind, someone who’ll have with them the sort of strong and conflicting relationship they had with their parents. She’s the only one who can make all of this happen.
And yet, a pregnancy is something so much more than “simply” generating a new human being, something I’ll never fully get, because as a man I’m not supposed to nor suited for it. There is this utterly intimate relationship between the mother, who feels the new being growing and behaving in her, and the baby, for whom the mother literally is the whole universe, separated by a thin layer of skin from what we call our universe, and yet completely independent. By giving birth to Carlo, Annarosa will have to share her baby with the rest of the world, and give the whole world to Carlo, the biggest and most tremendous gift one can give or receive.
I love pregnancy photo shoots because I know that all these thoughts and emotions are at their top. Mothers who want these photographs are looking for a testimony of how much love they were already giving to their baby, how much they are looking forward to meeting with them, but also how much they loved being pregnant, with all that this means.