Photographer Jill Hartley is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the book/project ‘Vessel of Life’. To see Jill ’s body of work, click on any photograph.
Birth and death, the most dramatic and sacred events in our lives, remind us of our mortality but also of our essential animality. I was fascinated with the experience and simply wanted to record the ephemeral state of my own body. Pregnant friends were then asking me to photograph them and thus the series was born in France in 1986. At the time, I had only seen photographs of pregnant women as freaky or silly, mostly taken by men, and never as gorgeous and in love with their bodies. Forty years ago, young women were just beginning to display their pregnant bellies proudly rather than hiding them under baggy “maternity clothes.” Dr. Alexandra Sacks writes in “Matrescence: The Birth of a Mother” that pregnancy involves similar hormonal and identity transitions to adolescence, and yet this natural process is often silenced or ignored. There is a lack of language to describe the amazing changes in body and spirit a woman goes through and she tends to keep these thoughts to herself, while all the attention is focused on the infant. When I began to show these photographs, it came as a great surprise that they made some people uncomfortable and I wondered how the most natural and awe-inspiring event, the way we all got here, could be too much to face. I find this attitude continues today.
All images and text © Jill Hartley
See also:
Vessel of Life/Le Beau Ventre (English/French)
Book By Jill Hartley
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What beautiful photographs, covering this subject in a sensitive way 🫂
Stunning images. Thank you for your hard work.