Anne Geddes on believing in herself despite her childhood
Photographer Anne Geddes writes in her new autobiography about her childhood on a cattle farm in Australia, with an “emotionally remote mother and a father who regularly demeaned his children.”
She “grew up with no sense of self-worth,” according to the interview article Anne Geddes’ newest baby is a ‘Labor of Love’, by Fran Henry, Plain Dealer Nov 07, 2007.
The article continues: “It has taken the wisdom of my years to see that my childhood was not ideal,” Geddes said.
She quit school at 17 and left home. “I wanted to get on with my life,” she said, not that she had any idea what that life might look like.
All she had was a vague sense that her life held promise. She remembered being 7 or 8, telling her mother there was “something I needed to do, but I didn’t quite know what it was.”
Her focus sharpened when she was 25. She picked up her husband Kel’s old 35 mm camera and, through trial and error, taught herself how to use it.
A publisher in Melbourne, Australia, rejected Anne Geddes’ early portfolio.
“You can’t just photograph babies,” he said flatly. As Geddes, 51, recalled, she laughed as she left his office. “He became known as the man who turned down Anne Geddes,” she said, smiling a bit.
On New Year’s Eve 1984, she surprised herself when she announced to her husband and friends, “I’m going to be the best-known baby photographer in the world.” She doesn’t know where those words came from, but she believed them.
Her earliest venture was making personalized Christmas cards embossed with a photograph of her two daughters, an innovation so unusual that the local newspaper wrote about her.
Not long after, a portrait in a Melbourne newspaper stopped her in her tracks. “I was taken by it and called the photographer. I asked, Would you like an unpaid assistant?” The photographer said yes. “I walked inside the studio and said to myself, This is where I am meant to be.”
And babies were meant to be her life. “It sounds like a cliche,” she said, “but I love babies. They’re my passion. They’re pure. There’s no such thing as a mean-spirited baby. And a baby represents so much potential.”
Also see her site annegeddes.com
Labor of Love: An Autobiography, by Anne Geddes
Related Talent Development Resources article & pages:
In Praise of Positive Obsessions
Early life
Passion
