When Anne Geddes began shooting her famous photographs, she soon learned she would need a backup baby \u2013 or 20. \u201cConnecting with a child who considers you a stranger is high stress,\u201d she says. \u201cI remember trying to shoot one baby sitting in a tank of water, surrounded by waterlilies. It took five babies to make it work. One of them was even called Lily, but she was not having a bar of it. She looked at me as if to say: \u2018You think I\u2019m getting in\u00a0that water?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
She describes the practicalities of one of her best-known shots, 1991\u2019s Cabbage Kids<\/a>. It shows twin brothers Rhys and Grant with cabbage-leaf hats on their heads, each sitting in an upturned cabbage, turning to one another with mild alarm. Geddes\u2019 assistant had tied a balloon to a piece of string, lowering it between them and whipping it up the moment they turned. Geddes got the shot.<\/p>\n Cabbage Kids, AKA Rhys and Grant. Photograph: Anne Geddes<\/p>\n \u201cThat whole world has changed; that income has gone,\u201d says the 68-year-old Australian from her home in Manhattan, New York. Technology has changed everything. She calls Cabbage Kids \u201cauthentic\u201d: \u201cThe props were all real. It was all in my garage. It\u2019s funny; with Photoshop and AI, it makes me sad to think that if you came to my work now, you might question whether it was real.<\/p>\n \u201cI think original stories will always prevail. That\u2019s why having people and humans behind the photographs is important. AI can\u2019t replicate that.\u201d<\/p>\n If you grew up in the 1990s, there\u00a0is every chance that, like me,\u00a0you tacked a Geddes poster to your wall. Babies upright in a flowerpot or a bucket, or gazing sleepily from a peony, a calla lily or\u00a0a bed of roses. Some were dressed as bumblebees, others with\u00a0little fairy wings, snoozing on\u00a0a bed of crisp autumn leaves. The images are whimsical, otherworldly and sometimes plain weird. But they have that rare quality of appealing to children without being\u00a0childish and have begun popping up again, often ironically, on social media.<\/p>\n Miracle: A Celebration of New Life by C\u00e9line Dion and Anne Geddes. Photograph: Scott Gries\/Getty Images<\/p>\n They were disseminated initially not just on Hallmark greetings cards, but also on the cover of Vogue Homme, in a Dior advert and\u00a0even in a 2004 book with C\u00e9line Dion (the best image shows the singer holding aloft a baby asleep inside an amniotic sac).<\/p>\n The height of that period, for Geddes, was appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show: \u201cShe came out carrying two babies dressed as bumblebees and we shot up the New York Times bestseller list!\u201d But for many millennials, the peak of her fame was the episode of Friends in which Elle Macpherson\u2019s character, Janine, moved in with Joey and attempted to \u201cgirlify\u201d his apartment using Geddes\u2019 photograph Tayla as a Waterlily<\/a>.<\/p>\n Geddes is striking, with silver hair, high cheekbones and bright skin, like Meryl Streep if Streep wore her cap backwards. She sits in front of a generic backdrop, warm, if a little reserved, speaking slowly and carefully about bumblebee suits and lily pads.<\/p>\n It\u2019s almost 30 years since she created Down in the Garden, a series of photographs of babies in and around flora and fauna, some of which will appear in her first ever retrospective, at the New Art Museum in T\u00fcbingen, Germany, this month. <\/strong>Among the 150 images are identical triplets sleeping in the hands of Jack, a school groundsman, whose hands also appeared in her 1993 photograph of Maneesha, a baby born prematurely at 28 weeks. For years, people have written to tell Geddes they keep this hopeful image on their fridge.<\/p>\n Tuli and Nyla. Photograph: Anne Geddes<\/p>\n