After 30 years in the business, world-famous photographer Anne Geddes has found renewed direction and drive. An artist, wife and best-selling author, Anne has lived a life of great fulfillment and passion. She talks to Jacqui Thompson about her latest collaboration with another Australian icon, Woolmark, and her new periodical My Pregnancy.

 

Having sold over 13 million calendars and 18 million books published in 83 countries and translated into 24 different languages, Anne Geddes is no stranger to success. Her first coffee table book Down in the Garden published in 1996 hit The New York Times Best Seller List with the aid of Oprah Winfrey’s passionate endorsement. The talk show queen had learnt about the book from her close friend Celine Dion. As with all great achievements, a combination of talent, drive, hard work, fateful events and good business management have led to Anne’s extraordinary success.

 

What’s more incredible is that Anne barely picked up a camera before the age of 25, yet she has managed to achieve worldwide recognition in a genre that had not existed before her: children’s photography.

Life on the land

Born in 1956, Anne grew up on a 26,000 acre beef cattle property in North Queensland. The third of four girls, Anne and her sisters lived an adventurous and pragmatic life on the land. She believes it was her childhood that gave rise to her sense that there is something bigger than herself.

“When you’re out in the country it gives you a broader perspective. There is more space around you and it is enormously beneficial to a creative person like me,” explains Anne. “You are more self-reliant and it is more relaxed in terms of what you can and can’t do. [Bush kids] do more practical things like collect the eggs. They know where eggs come from, they know where milk comes from, they know that there are droughts, are aware of the seasons.”

Having sold over 13 million calendars and 18 million books published in 83 countries and translated into 24 different languages, Anne Geddes is no stranger to success. Her first coffee table book Down in the Garden published in 1996 hit The New York Times Best Seller List with the aid of Oprah Winfrey’s passionate endorsement. The talk show queen had learnt about the book from her close friend Celine Dion. As with all great achievements, a combination of talent, drive, hard work, fateful events and good business management have led to Anne’s extraordinary success. What’s more incredible is that Anne barely picked up a camera before the age of 25, yet she has managed to achieve worldwide recognition in a genre that had not existed before her: children’s photography.

 

Life on the land

Born in 1956, Anne grew up on a 26,000 acre beef cattle property in North Queensland. The third of four girls, Anne and her sisters lived an adventurous and pragmatic life on the land. She believes it was her childhood that gave rise to her sense that there is something bigger than herself.

“When you’re out in the country it gives you a broader perspective. There is more space around you and it is enormously beneficial to a creative person like me,” explains Anne. “You are more self-reliant and it is more relaxed in terms of what you can and can’t do. [Bush kids] do more practical things like collect the eggs. They know where eggs come from, they know where milk comes from, they know that there are droughts, are aware of the seasons.”

It was this foundation of experiencing the natural world and its cycles that played some part in Anne’s relationship with nature and its inherent beauty. Though it took her a while to realise photography would become her medium, she had always appreciated still life imagery. Life magazine was her favourite; Anne would spend hours being mesmerised by the images, marvelling at a singular moment in time captured forever.

She describes her career path as an organic one, education was less structured in those days. Photography courses were not available at school and it had not occurred to Anne to become a photographer. “I was the first photographer I ever met, ” she says. During her teens Anne was taken with the idea of sign-writing, often viewing beautiful old signage painted on shopfronts. But her first business venture would be a children’s clothing store, Daddy Long Legs, at the tender age of 22. Shortly after, Anne moved on from retail and was hired as the secretary at a local Brisbane television station. It was here that she met Kel Geddes, her future husband and business partner.

 

Camera in hand

The couple married in 1983 while living in Hong Kong, where Kel was employed as President of Programming at a television station. It was here that Anne decided to take the leap and try her hand at professional photography. With no formal training she put a note up in the local supermarket advertising portraiture services – terrified the phone would ring. And it did. Learning from the ground up, Anne was nervous prior to every portrait sitting, still defining her style and refining her work with natural light.

Early on, she was aware that traditional family portraiture was staid, with families wearing their Sunday best. Anne wanted to go deeper than merely capture a child’s image, she wanted to capture the essence of their character. “I thought, ‘That’s not really how you want to remember your children’. If you are looking back at a photograph of your adult child at two, wouldn’t you want a sense of their character?”

The couple initially relocated to Sydney, where Kel worked for Channel Seven, before moving to Melbourne after Kel was head hunted by Channel Nine. It was in Melbourne, while pregnant with her first daughter Stephanie, that Anne offered her unpaid assistance to a local children’s portrait photographer Leanne Temme. “I’d just go and help, and watch... I remember the first moment I walked into the studio, I thought, ‘This is where I belong, this is it’. Simple background, lighting, and I just felt completely at home.”

Anne set up her own studio in the garage of her Melbourne home. She conducted a small amount of portraiture, while raising Stephanie and her second daughter Kelly. A portrait of Stephanie age two won Anne her first photographic prize. Nulab in Melbourne, where Anne had her film developed, awarded the image second prize in their annual photographic competition. “I was just blown away. I was so excited by the award,” Anne recalls.

The young family then moved to Auckland, New Zealand, where Kel was offered a network position that was too good to refuse, to head the launch of TV3. Anne decided to focus more on her portraiture work and set up a small studio in Newmarket, Auckland. “It was tiny, like 450 square feet. To change the canvas backdrops – I only had two – I’d have to empty the entire studio and then put everything back again.”

Little did Anne know that from such humble beginnings great success would follow. “I know it is an old cliche, but there is no such thing as an overnight success,” believes Anne. “When you are back there, you don’t know what the future holds either. I just decided I wanted to become the best photographer of children in Auckland.” Then, one New Year’s Eve, Anne would make another resolution: to become the best photographer of children in the world.

 

The path to success

The editor of an Auckland-based magazine called More approached Anne impressed with her portfolio, which mainly consisted of hand-coloured black and white portraits taken in Melbourne. In particular, the editor was taken with the image of a little girl called Gemma dressed in a tutu. It was published as a full page in More after which Anne was inundated with calls from parents wanting family portraits taken.

For approximately 12 years Anne focused on portraiture and, in the early days, undertook wedding photography. “They were great years,” she remembers. “A lot of young photographers who are coming through now are like ‘Ooh that’s a dirty word – portraiture or weddings’, or ‘I don’t want to do that, I just want to be instantly fabulous. I want to shoot fashion’,” she muses, “but it’s the hours in between... There was a book out a couple of years ago that said you need to do your ten thousand hours and that is just so right.”

For Anne those ten thousand hours were spent dealing with families and children, two subjects that raised great challenges, yet afforded her a solid training ground.

“Portraits, were twice a day, five days a week for 10 to 12 years, but I learnt a lot,” recalls Anne. “How to deal with people, how to work with light, how to deal with tricky situations and people’s expectations. And dealing with children of all ages, because there is a vast difference between a newborn, a three-year-old, a six-month-old and an 18-month-old. It is hard and you need an enormous amount of energy.”

 

“I walked into the studio, I thought, ‘This is where I belong, this is it’. Simple background, lighting, and I just felt completely at home.”

 

Early in her career Anne joined the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photography (NZIPP), “Acceptance by your peers, when you are starting out is incredibly important, it is validation,” explains Anne. “Each year they [NZIPP] ran a big competition and I got really motivated by entering and winning awards. It was interesting that baby photography, my work, was winning awards; top portrait of the year, that sort of thing. And it was very much a male establishment over there.”

Anne remained passionate about photographing children both in a professional capacity and as a creative outlet, though there was some resistance to “baby photos” in the professional arena. The attitude back then, according to Anne, was one of ‘when are you going to shoot something else?’ But for her, children were her subjects and she could not understand what was not to love about them.

Anne recalls one of her first competitions with the NZIPP when she had won the portraiture section with an image of a little girl wearing pearls, a single teardrop in her eye as a result of being startled by the flash. It came to the Championship prize where the winners from each section competed. As Anne’s image was awaiting judgement, one of the female judges, who had been on the panel for many years, dramatically recorded a score of zero.

Anne, devastated by the result, was stunned when the representative from Kodak came up to her and said, “Thank god a picture of a baby didn’t win the Championship print. How could we have a picture of a baby on the boardroom wall at Kodak?”

It was then that Anne realised what she was up against. She was serious about her work but people weren’t taking it seriously.

 

Onwards and upwards

The strain of endless hours spent recording portraits led to a level of burn-out for Anne and the additional pressure to produce an Anne Geddes quality image every time was exhausting. “I would invariably get them, but I’d be shattered afterwards because of the level of expectation for an Anne Geddes photograph, which wasn’t as [high] as it is now, but even then in New Zealand I was the person who delivers. It was at this point I was a little worn out and I thought, ‘Once a month, do something for yourself where you are not working for anyone else’,” says Anne.

This decision, to feed her creative side, led to Anne’s incredible success. During the week, while battling toddlers, she would fortify herself with the knowledge that she had something to look forward to, something just for her. Some of her earliest creations included the cabbage patch kids and the famous image of newborn Joshua hanging delicately in a calico sling. She enjoyed these shoots so much that soon she had a collection of imagery.

 

“A lot of the images I am known for today, like the flower pots and the Christmas shots were specifically shot for the greeting card ranges.”

Anne recalls the creation of the first baby in the flower pot image. “It happened entirely by accident. We had all these empty flower pots out the back of the studio. Everything was dying, so they just sat there. It was in the 90s when everyone had a little mini-cactus on the windowsill. When a mother arrived with her baby for a portrait it had a little furry cap on and I thought, ‘Oh that looks just like my cactus at home’. So innocently I popped the baby into a pot!” The rest, as they say, is history.

John Sands NZ approached Anne to do a greeting card range, which became a successful venture and helped her ease out of portraiture work. Anne found many of the portrait pictures she had taken over the years translated well into greeting cards and many of the images for which she is best known were actually shot for cards.

“A lot of the images I am known for today, like the flower pots and the Christmas shots were specifically shot for the greeting card ranges and I don’t know if people understand that. Sometimes I feel like explaining: it’s not art, it was never meant to be,” Anne says. “I do occasionally feel like I have a flower pot hanging around my neck.” she laughs.

In 1992 Kel Geddes left his successful television career to become Anne’s business partner. The greeting card business was doing well and Anne continued to achieve professional recognition. “Kel is very supportive and he is also able to see things on a global scale. It just completely freed me up,” says Anne.

Kel played an integral part in creating the Anne Geddes global brand, finding international publishers for her greeting cards. Later, Kel had the foresight to convince American greeting card company Portal to put the Annes Geddes name on the front of the card rather than the back. This was unheard of, but within a year became a huge success.

Prior to the international greeting card push, thoughts of producing a calendar surfaced, although the couple could not find an interested publisher or distributor, so they took the project upon themselves. Anne then came into contact with Lady Sarah Fay, a New Zealand social identity who was trying to raise awareness about child abuse and its prevention, a subject considered taboo in those days. Anne felt an intense need to help and so she dedicated a percentage of every calendar sale to the cause.

“What we were saying through positive imagery was that it was okay to talk about it. It wasn’t okay back then; you couldn’t even talk about child abuse [incest] on the news. It is vastly different now, thank goodness. We are very proud we played some small part in that.”

After the calendar had gone on sale, tragically Anne found out that one of her sisters had been sexually abused for two years while they were at school. The news came as a terrible shock. “I’d been talking about the prevention of child abuse, it’s awful, awful. We are raising the level of awareness and for that to be right in my backyard, it was a terrible shock. I was just furious and upset. A lot more of it goes on than people know.”

The Geddeses worked to help Anne’s sister financially and emotionally face the past, and eventually a conviction of the perpetrator, a headmaster, was achieved. Their personal proximity to the issue of child abuse further drove Anne and Kel to raise funds for the cause. They literally went door-to-door selling the calendars from the back of their car, on street corners and in camera outlets. In total they collected more than US$20,000 to help aid the prevention of child abuse and neglect. This initiative would form the basis of what would become a lifetime of philanthropy through the nonprofit organisation, Geddes Philanthropic Trust. In time, a percentage of the sales would be given from all products sold under the Anne Geddes name.

A second calendar was published in 1993, the following year, the couple risked their life savings with two young children to care for to print 20,000 copies that were sold in Australia. The calendars sold out in three weeks and the profits were used to print a further 20,000 copies. With a second sell-out edition, publishers soon came knocking.

 

Hitting the stratosphere

The natural progression from cards, posters and calendars was a book. Inspired by reading bedtime stories to her daughters at night, Anne imagined a fairytale told through photography.

“It was a phenomenon, you know,” Anne reflects. “Down in the Garden is an institution. People still talk about it now, but when I photographed Down in the Garden it wasn’t meant to be art. Just Anne Geddes in a studio in New Zealand, thinking this would be sweet, what people imagine in gardens: fairies. And my girls were that age. A beautiful children’s story.

“I said to Kel there’s no way it’s going anywhere unless it has a children’s story, because that is what it was. While I was doing that I was working on classic imagery that was winning awards. It [Down in the Garden] was actually quite clever, and it was before Photoshop!”

In 1996 Down in the Garden was published and the Geddeses retained an American publisher who identified the commercial viability of the book. This led to two of the world’s biggest stars, Celine Dion and Oprah Winfrey, championing Anne’s creation. Celine was asked what she would be giving friends that Christmas and her answer was a copy of Down in the Garden. A call from Oprah’s producers followed and Anne was asked to go on the famous show. “She’s [Oprah] extraordinary. She’s been absolutely fantastic to me and so generous. I think that is why everyone loves her.”

Anne recalls her fateful Oprah appearance. “She walked out onto stage with two babies in bumblebee outfits, I think. They [the outfits] were too small. It was such a surreal moment. At the end of the interview, I can’t remember her exact words, I have never watched the interview, she picked up Down in the Garden and said, ‘This is the best coffee table book I have ever seen’, then she just put it down and it went zoooooom to number three on The New York Times Best Seller List. It was a record for that price point at that time.”

This event brought Anne international acclaim with more books and calendars to follow. Until Now, My First Five Years and Little Thoughts with Love collectively sold 14 million copies by 2000, in conjunction with Down in the Garden. In 2002 Anne released two bestsellers, Pure – a combination of black and white, and colour photography looking at newborns and the beauty of pregnancy – and Miracle, an artistic collaboration with Celine Dion.

In 2005 Anne published Cherished Thoughts with Love and in 2007 Be Gentle with the Young. More recently her personal memoirs A Labor of Love was published in 2008 and Beginnings in 2010. To date 18 million Anne Geddes books have been sold and translated into 24 languages. Anne Geddes calendars have been in production for 20 years and remain bestsellers, available in over 30 countries and in 19 different languages.

 

Philanthropy and child protection

The Geddes’ deeply held belief is that we must “protect, nurture and love all children”. Since 1992 they have donated US$5.7 million to help prevent child abuse in Australia, New Zealand, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

In 1998 the Geddes Philanthropic Trust was formally created. The first fellowship placed by the Trust was with the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney. Funding was provided to support a primary physician concentrating on the identification, treatment and research of child abuse and neglect.

The Trust has gone on to work with numerous children’s hospitals around the world and has contributed to several large-scale humanitarian efforts, including those in relation to the earthquake in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina in the United States. Also early in 2005, the Trust donated over US$83,000 to the UNICEF South Asia Tsunami Relief Effort.

 

To date 18 million Anne Geddes books have been sold and translated into 24 languages.

 

Recently the Geddeses joined forces with the United Nations Foundation beginning work on the Foundation’s initiative Every Woman, Every Child.

“The UN Foundation approached us to be involved in the Every Woman, Every Child initiative, which aims to make a difference to the 16 million women who will die before 2015 due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth that are easily preventable, and all the babies who die in the first 28 days through totally preventable reasons. Ultimately, I’d like to take this project to different countries around the world. We’re hoping to start in India.”

 

A life more ordinary

With so much success, did Anne ever feel affected? “Some people get carried away with it I think, by their own sense of self-importance, but with what I do you could never be like that. Babies are the biggest grounders,” she explains.

“There is no bigger ego in the room than a newborn and every parent that brings a baby home knows what it is like. All you want to do is make them happy because if they are not happy, nobody is happy. And in order to photograph a newborn you must be genuine. Mothers know if you are not. I genuinely just love my subject matter, so international press tours and things like that were always a bit bizarre.”

There were times of course when Anne had to pinch herself. Her work became iconic imagery and received worldwide acclaim. “When it was happening I was like, ‘Is this for real? People know you as a household name...’ And there was a conscious moment where I did think, ‘Well, you are just Anne Geddes, that’s who you are. That name is out there, it is just you’ – but it’s not.”

Then there was family life to keep Anne real. She and Kel chose to remain in New Zealand for many years before moving back to Australia. They didn’t want the girls to be a part of the international Anne Geddes phenomenon. To them, Mum was just a photographer. Anne recalls when the girls’ school asked her to give a talk to the senior students. When she told her daughters that she would be coming to school to talk, they both looked mortified, exclaiming ‘What about?’.”

 

Things come full circle

After 30 years in the business, Anne has much to reflect upon. “What’s been incredibly fulfilling for me is that I sit here at 55 and it‘s extraordinary that I have been able to do what I’ve done, work to my own agenda, and that people have come along with me on this journey. I’ve got all this support and people really get what we are trying to do.

“I want to work to change the lives of pregnant women and newborns around the world. There are so many women dying of preventable causes and so this whole journey for me has brought me out the other side.”

Anne’s new journey has already begun with the publication of her periodical My Pregnancy. The second edition is currently on the magazine shelves. For the last 30 years, Anne has shared in so many women’s stories about pregnancy and birth. In 2010 she released her book Beginnings, in which she photographed elements of nature that brought forth new life – one of them being pregnant women. Anne enjoyed photographing the natural elements and the pregnant women so passionately she decided to continue. My Pregnancy offered the perfect outlet both for Anne’s creative work and the personal stories of these amazing women.

“In generations past when women became pregnant they would have either witnessed many births or heard many pregnancy stories. These days, many women have not even held a newborn because we have become so fragmented in society and I just thought you can’t beat these face-to-face stories.”

With the recent joining of forces between the Geddeses and the UN Foundation, Anne and Kel are looking to expand the reach of My Pregnancy globally through the Every Woman, Every Child initiative. “Let’s go to countries like India and photograph women from all walks of life, and to the African countries and Europe,” enthuses Anne. “Let’s unite women around the world by storytelling, it’s a lovely long-term project and just the start of the journey.”

A couple that has shared both great sadness and joy with Anne in the My Pregnancy series is Rachel and her husband Jeff. After the devastating loss of their first child Sierra Willow they joyfully fell pregnant again bringing gorgeous Willow Sage into the world. At six months of age Willow Sage stars on page 165 in Studio Bambini’s ‘Two Peas in a Pod’ fashion shoot. A superstar in the making.

 

True blue

Being proud of her country Australian heritage, with a great respect for those who make a living off the land, Anne felt honoured when The Woolmark Company invited her to collaborate on their global Mother & Baby campaign.

“Woolmark stands for something significant,” believes Anne, “they stand for quality wool. I know the struggles of Australian wool growers and people on the land, and I was incredibly proud [to be asked], it was just a no-brainer. I’ve been photographing babies with wool ever since I started. When we looked back at the old imagery, so much of it was with wool, it was natural. I said I would love to be involved.”

The Mother & Baby campaign has launched globally to promote the natural benefits of using Australian Merino wool in infant bedding and clothing. The Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) has conducted studies which show Merino wool possesses inherent moisture and temperature management properties that naturally assist in the regulation of body temperature. Babies are far more prone to heat loss and heat rises than adults.

Merino wool also provides a more comfortable environment for sleep as the natural breathability and active moisture management help prevent skin becoming clammy. Australian Merino wool in particular is known for its superior quality with many of the top international fashion brands around the world brandishing the Australian Woolmark tag. In fact, the Woolmark logo is one of the most recognised textile symbols in the world.

Anne’s imagery was the logical choice for communicating the benefits of Merino wool for infants. “Woolmark was great, they said just do whatever you want,” says Anne. “We came up with concepts, they loved them. We started with the Woolmark logo. I remember they looked at it and said that no one had thought of that. It was just so obvious.”

Anne conducted a location shoot for the campaign in a shearing shed in Goulburn and she recalls coordinating pregnant woman, lambs and the shoot all in a shed because of the intense cold. “I don’t shoot on location, but we had to go to the baby lamb, it was just born the night before,” Anne remembers. “I didn’t know anything about lambs. They are actually quite docile when they are first born, they just fold up their gangly legs and cuddle. We didn’t want to take the lamb away from the sight of its mother. She must have been thinking, what the hell are all these lights and people? The wind was whistling up through the floor which had gaps where the sheep’s poo goes, and we took an extra pregnant lady in case one of them had their baby the night before.”

Prior to photographing the lamb, Anne wanted to give it a bath. She asked farmer Robert, the owner of the property, what she should use. He replied the fabric conditioner, “Softly.” And so Anne did.