Anne Elizabeth Geddes is an Australian-born photographer, currently living and working in New York. Geddes' books have been published in 83 countries. According to Amazon.com, she has sold more than 18 million books and 13 million calendars. In 1997, Cedco Publishing sold more than 1.8 million calendars and date books bearing Geddes' photography. Her debut book, in 1996, Down in the Garden, made it to the New York Times Bestseller List. Her books have been translated into 23 different languages.
Early life
In her 2007 autobiography Labor of Love, Geddes talked about her difficult early years at their family cattle farm in Queensland, Australia. She dropped out of school at 17 and left home. Later, she met and married Kel Geddes, and moved to Hong Kong in 1983 for his work in television. There, at age 25, she taught herself photography using her husband's 35mm Pentax K1000 camera. By the time the couple returned to Sydney two years later, she had built a small portfolio. She started specializing in baby photography after using photographs of her two daughters for a family Christmas card proved popular.
Career
Geddes became a photographer at age 30 after she moved to Melbourne due to her husband's work. She assisted a local photographer before starting her own studio from her garage. She had always had an interest in photography in general, but the schools she attended did not offer photography classes. She chose babies as her subject because of her love of them. "I had seen the way children and babies were generally being photographed. It just didn't seem realistic to me that people took their children along to photographic studios all dressed in their Sunday best, photographs that didn't really show the personality of the child." During the progression of her career, Geddes created her own philanthropic program named "Geddes Philanthropic Trust". Its primary focus was to raise awareness of child abuse and neglect. Her philanthropic program raised many opportunities for not only her community, but also for her business. Her philanthropic work has been very successful. In 2013, she created a series for the survivors of Meningococcal Disease. The photographs depict families and children that have been affected by the disease and honours those who have survived. She shot photographs of 15 child survivors of meningitis for the Protecting Our Tomorrows: Portraits of Meningococcal Disease campaign. Geddes believes that "emotional content is an image's most important element" and that people are drawn to her work because of its simplicity and personality. She prefers black-and-white to colour photography as she feels that colour distracts from the image and the natural beauty of life.
Process
Geddes does not audition babies for use as models because she believes all babies are beautiful. Instead, she keeps in touch with multiple birth and twin clubs and has thousands of photographs on file that parents have sent her. Geddes currently resides in New York with her husband Kel. A typical sitting takes place in the morning when the babies are well-rested, and lasts about half an hour; otherwise, the babies could get too bored or fussy. "You have to be really fast," Geddes says about getting good shots. She sets up her studio in advance — props, lighting, cameras, and equipment — so that all the baby or babies have to do is sit. Many of her props are custom made, such as oversized shoes and flowerpots. She keeps the babies' parents nearby for extra assistance with expressions.
In a skit on The Ronnie Johns Half Hour, Geddes helps a Chinese family hide their additional children from one-child policy inspectors, by camouflaging them in conspicuous places, which the inspectors are unable to notice. McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the humour site of McSweeney's, published a Short Imagined Monologue called "An Anne Geddes Baby Grows Up". Humor website The Onion spoofed Geddes' style with "Anne Geddes Starting to Lose It". In an episode of Friends, specifically, the eighth episode of the sixth season entitled "The One with Ross's Teeth", Joey Tribbiani complains to his roommate Janine about a Geddes photograph she hung on the living room wall. The photograph depicted a baby Joey didn't recognize dressed as a water lily. After being told that Anne Geddes is a famous artist, he assumes that the baby is Anne Geddes. On the comedy website called Funny or Die, there was a humorous skit on the adulthood of the babies from her photos. On the June 26, 2017 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Colbert shows a drawing of Sean Spicer and jokingly showed how Spicer would look as depicted by famous artists, including Geddes. In the American Dad! episode "The Census of the Lambs", Klaus copies Geddes' photographs in his own photoshoot and gets attacked by an angry version of Geddes. In an episode of The Office Angela Martin and Andrew Bernard use Jan Levinson's baby in a Geddes-style photo shoot, while the two of them are visiting Dunder Mifflin for Jan's debauched baby shower. Jan finds them in the break room, and is enraged that they are photographing a baby using a flash, and that Astrid is on a table surrounded by vegetables and dressed in cabbage leaves. Geddes' name is never mentioned directly, but her style of photography was heavily implied.
