Pregnant pose
Sonia DE LA ROSA, a 29-year-old registered nurse from San Diego, is reclining in a lounge chair in a garage-cum-studio in Encino getting ready for her photo shoot. She has already changed out of her black pants and crisp blue-and-white striped blouse and is now wearing a cozy blue robe and bright pink fuzzy slippers. Shally Zucker, the makeup artist, finishes blending in the last bit of cover-up and then gently opens De La Rosa’s robe, revealing her large, bulging belly.
“Wow, you hardly have any stretch marks at all,” Zucker says as she smooths foundation over De La Rosa’s stomach, blending away the linea nigra, the brown vertical line that runs from the navel to the pubic bone.
As Zucker applies the finishing touches, the photographer, Rachel Jeraffi, emerges from the studio.
“Are you ready to start?” she asks.
A little nervously, De La Rosa nods. Jeraffi and Zucker pull her out of the chair -- it appears to have swallowed her -- and she follows the photographer into the large, darkened room.
Building a career
For the past 10 years, Jeraffi has made a career of taking pictures of pregnant women like De La Rosa. She shoots an average of four pregnant women a week, some who have found her on the Internet and flown in from Canada or Arizona. A three-hour session with Jeraffi costs $575 ($675 on weekends) and includes three rolls of black-and-white medium-format film, face and belly makeup, light hairstyling and proof prints. The photos themselves can cost as little as $55 for one 5-by-7 print and as much as $2,715 for a personalized leather scrapbook of 25 8-by-10 images.
To highlight her clients’ distinctive bodies, Jeraffi asks them to remove their clothes and then wraps them in various fabrics, making sure to respect each woman’s privacy boundaries. But by the end of the sessions most of her clients (very few of whom have ever dropped their clothes in front of a camera before) are completely nude, with an arm covering their breasts and just a slip of fabric over their genitalia.
“When I was growing up in Israel, women wore really big stuff when they were pregnant and covered it up as much as possible,” Jeraffi says. “It was definitely not something anybody would want to capture on film.”
To this day, she says, her mother has mixed feelings about her work. “My mother is like, ‘Rachel, your work is beautiful, but who the hell pays you to do that?’ I’m like, ‘You’d be surprised, Mom.’ ”
In 1991, Tina Brown and Annie Leibovitz created an uproar by putting a naked, eight-months-pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. But they also helped designate pregnancy as glamorous. There was decidedly less media frenzy when Cindy Crawford posed pregnant and nude for the cover of W magazine in 1999, and since then pregnancy photography has become increasingly popular not just for movie stars and models, but for regular women as well.
“When I started off it was, I don’t want to say hippie-dippy granola people, but it was the kind of people you would expect to take their clothes off,” says Jennifer Loomis, who has been specializing in pregnancy photography for over 12 years and who flies around the country to meet with clients. “Now I have sorority girls, black women, who tend to be more demure. I do a lot of lesbian couples. I have a ton of Asian clients -- Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans -- and their culture tends to be more modest. Those women often won’t tell their parents beforehand.”
“My clients are teachers, doctors, nurses, you name it,” says Heather Hart, a photographer in Santa Monica who says 70% of her business is pregnant women. “Now I even have husbands calling me to set up a shoot for their wives.”
Sandra Matthews, an associate professor of film and photography at Hampshire College and the coauthor of “Pregnant Pictures,” which traces the history of photographs of pregnant women in America, says pregnancy portraiture is a recent phenomenon. When her book was published in 2000, she and her coauthor were unaware that women were paying to have themselves photographed. “Even in the late ‘90s we spoke to photographers who were trying to publish art books of photos of pregnant women but who couldn’t find publishers,” she says. “There was a kind of squeamishness about the topic, and the publishers didn’t think they could sell it.”
The shoot
“We’re going to start covered and then see what happens,” Jeraffi tells De La Rosa.
She pops a CD into a small boombox (Lifescapes’ Celtic harp compilation) and selects two pieces of white silk from a rack of fabrics she keeps on the far wall of her studio.
De La Rosa stands a little uncomfortably on a black backdrop. Jeraffi returns with the silks and asks De La Rosa to remove her robe.
She glances at Jeraffi and pauses for a moment.
“Just drop it,” Jeraffi says. “There is no modesty in this studio.”
With a blush, and a nervous laugh, De La Rosa lets the robe fall to the floor.
Jeraffi ties one piece of silk below De La Rosa’s protruding tummy so that it looks like a long skirt, and she ties the other under her arms so her chest and stomach are covered. Then she steps back and turns on an industrial fan positioned six feet away. The silk billows in the breeze, revealing De La Rosa’s stomach, and her dark shoulder length hair streams behind her.
“Beautiful! Just let the air out! Good! Very nice!” Jeraffi yells over the fan and the harp music, standing behind her camera now. She has De La Rosa clasp her hands under her chin and throw her head back at an angle. “Great!” Jeraffi yells. “Just close your eyes and let your belly out!”
An idealized view
This is De La Rosa’s first pregnancy. “I always wanted to have a baby by 30, and my due date is just under two weeks before my 30th birthday,” she says. There was no question of the father coming to the shoot (although some men do). He currently lives in Chicago, where De La Rosa thinks she will move in a few months.
She first heard about Jeraffi’s work three years ago when her sister Maribel was pregnant with her first child. Maribel had seen Jeraffi on an episode of “A Baby Story” on the Learning Channel and was so desperate to have Jeraffi photograph her pregnancy that she tracked down the producer of the show to get her contact information. Jeraffi says many of her clients have heard about her from the TLC program, which was replayed almost once a month for three years. She also advertises in pregnancy magazines, has a website and leaves fliers in maternity stores and yoga studios.
All of Jeraffi’s photos have the same aesthetic. The focus and lighting are soft, and the subjects are swathed in diaphanous fabrics -- usually silks and tulles -- if they are wearing anything at all. She always asks her subjects to close their eyes, as if in peaceful meditation on the growing life within them. The resulting photographs look like ethereal glamour shots, in which the subjects appear as beautiful and as tranquil as possible -- an idealized version of the pregnant condition.
What the pictures don’t show is any of the pain associated with pregnancy. Jeraffi tells her clients to schedule appointments between their 30th and 32nd week -- when their bellies are big but the rest of their bodies haven’t started to swell. With the help of the makeup artists she hires, she hides stretch marks and any signs of exhaustion. Jeraffi was even able to photograph a client who came to her with an IV in her arm, and conceal it.
“We took the bag off the pole and strapped it to my thigh,” says Melissa Martineau, who had been in the hospital for severe side pain at the time of her appointment with Jeraffi. “I did poses standing, kneeling, laying down, sometimes totally naked. Most of them were shot from the side so you couldn’t see it, or if they were facing head on we draped a little fabric over my arm.
“My husband is really conservative, and I didn’t know if he would like the pictures,” she continues. “But we just got them back, and when he saw them he was in awe. He wants us to buy them all.”
Jeraffi says her sessions are “self-esteem boosters.” “Because when you are pregnant you don’t usually feel like you are beautiful a lot of the time,” she says. “You feel sick and you are heavy, but looking at yourself without all the stretch marks and without all the uncomfortableness ... it is like seeing yourself from the outside.”
Booming business
When Linnea Lenkus set up her photography studio in South Pasadena in 1998, she specialized in portraits of kids and babies. But ever since the Cindy Crawford cover of W in 1999 the number of pregnant women who call her has grown exponentially. Now about half the work she does is pregnancy portraiture. “I think the W magazine cover just started people thinking about it and feeling they wanted to do that for themselves,” she says.
According to Matthews, the iconic magazine covers, and the increasing popularity of maternity clothes designed to accentuate rather than conceal large bellies, helped change the public perception of pregnancy. “I think it was a reflection of people being more accepting of the pregnant body as sexual and attractive,” she says.
Many women say they feel especially sexy during their pregnancy.
“Oh my God, I loved being pregnant,” says Diana Roth, one of Jeraffi’s clients. “I loved every minute of it. I loved the way I felt, loved the way I looked. All my clothes were short and tight. I loved showing my belly.”
“There were many times when I felt the sexiest I ever felt during my pregnancy,” says Crystal Edwards, another of Jeraffi’s clients. “I went to my high school reunion at eight months pregnant and it was a relief. I looked great without having to lose 10 pounds.”
And men have responded as well.
“My husband happens to be the man who is really attracted to me when I’m pregnant,” says Jessica Echeverry, one of Hart’s clients. “When I’m pregnant he finds me really attractive and pretty. He said, ‘I want it captured in pictures, so go find someone.’ ”
Lenkus also thinks that since more older women are having children, and because of fertility pills and treatments, there are more “miracle babies.”
“Pregnancy has become a really big thing, especially for women who never thought it would happen to them,” says Lenkus, who was once told she would never have a baby, but now has a son and recently gave birth to twins. “When I was pregnant last time I was so happy. I photographed myself every month. I just loved to watch it.”
‘Let the air out’
De LA ROSA’S photo session is winding down. Jeraffi changes the CD in the boombox to one called “The Science of Sleep” and takes a series of shots of De La Rosa totally naked, lying on a mattress covered in soft camel-colored velvet.
“We’re almost done, you just have three left, OK?” she says, stepping down from her ladder.
De La Rosa nods, but she looks tired. She left her house at 8 in the morning to make it to the 11 o’clock appointment, and she still has the three-hour return drive to look forward to.
“Do you want the Eve look?” Jeraffi asks.
De La Rosa nods again, and Jeraffi takes a plastic vine from the rack of fabrics. She snakes the fake plant around De La Rosa’s body and, after spreading out the tired pregnant woman’s hair on the mattress, climbs back up the ladder.
“Great, Sonia,” she says. “Let the air out. Beautiful.”
