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Austrailian Anne Geddes has made a career of photographing babies. Olan Mills she ain't -- think what William Wegman would do with a wee sleeping babe. With the use of elaborate props and costumes, and superb digital editing, Geddes makes her chubby infants the characters in complex compositions.
Her new book, Down in the Garden, imagines a world where a watermelon has hands, feet, and a sweet sleeping face; where sunflowers smile; where a butterfly chrysalis has a nodding head. Geddes captures the supreme relaxation of a sleeping child; the miracle is how she gets these chubbies to pose so peacefully in such wild garb.
Anna Quindlen feels the miracle of babies, too -- naked ones, in particular. "Adults in the presence of a naked baby reach out their hands, as though to warm themselves at the fire of perfection," she writes in the lovely Naked Babies. Quindlen's gentle essays are complemented by Nick Kelsh's duotone photographs: a big fish smile, a wrinkly bottom, a string of pearly toes. The book leaves one with a tugged heart and a nod of agreement when she writes, "Bless your babies, gone so quickly into the thicket of adulthood."
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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