Upsetting Day: Anne Geddes' Baby Photos

If you don't know the name Anne Geddes you're probably still familiar with her work; she's a photographer who specializes in making babies as uncomfortable as possible. She constructs very cute prisons for babies. She photographs babies in positions that make you say, "wow, we come into this world with so much promise, and then some idiot puts a big hat on us, and we can't do anything to stop them."

Anne Geddes was huge in the early 2000s. She even did a collaborative album and coffee table book with Celine Dion called Miracle, A Celebration Of New Life. It featured Celine Dion modeling babies like they were her new accessories line. There's one picture where Celine Dion has shoved someone's baby into a big, sheer, sock and is holding it on her tummy. That's not her baby, so the clear indication is that she ate that baby.

I recently read about fifteen of the seemingly endless Anne Geddes art books in existence. Seriously, with the number of books this woman has put out using reprints of old photos newly arranged, you could build a whole Library of Alexandria for dumb baby photos. If you're now picturing me walking into my local library, spreading my arms as wide as possible, and picking up the entire Anne Geddes section, you're correct. The librarian told me legally, they have to call the suicide hotline for anyone who needs this many babies in silly hats to feel joy. I told her an unblinking 40 minute smile.

I invented a little Anne Geddes game during my marathon viewing of Anne's work. I call it, "Does Ann Geddes Hate This Baby? Or Does This Baby Hate Ann Geddes?" There's a menacing aura to Anne's work I think she is sometimes aware of and other times very much not. For instance, can you imagine bringing your child to a photographer most famous for photographing babies curled up, napping, in pretty little flowers, and she's like, "Sorry, Ma'am, today is rat baby day!"

Anne Geddes clearly hated those babies. I like to imagine they were fussy that day, and she said, "you know what, kid? You've been downgraded from snoozing on a daisy petal to being crammed into an old boot." These babies took it well, though. They carry no malice towards Anne Geddes; however, the egg baby, the egg baby hated Anne Geddes.

The malice of Egg Baby will forever haunt me. There's no way Anne Geddes purposely lit this baby's face to make its eye sockets look like they were filled with endless pools of darkness, right? The entire idea of a human-looking baby hatching from an egg is unsettling, but the way its tiny hand is gripping the side of that eggshell as if it's trying to escape as quickly as possible to seek its vengeance on all of humankind, that's the kind of cute little detail only Anne Geddes would come up with.

You might think creepy egg baby is the most menacing photograph Anne Geddes ever took, you adorable little idiot, but no. As Picasso famously had a blue period and a rose period, Anne Geddes went through an iconic dead clown baby period.

Dressing a baby as a clown isn't breaking any new territory, so Anne's high fashion twist on baby clowns was: what if the clowns were also dead? She loved these clown babies with her whole heart, but the clown babies should have hated Anne Geddes. It's hard to tell with all of the makeup and posing what their true intentions were, but if they didn't hate Anne Geddes, they should have.

The dead clown children are old enough to remember this experience and log into their subconscious as either a dream or a completely unprocessable life experience where their parents were paid to dress them as a clown and then shove them in a big clown pile with other children. At least the meat hook baby won't remember its experience with Anne Geddes, and that's the kindest gift she can give these children-- the gift of photographing them while their brains are still essentially a thick soup.

Something about seeing this baby daintily hung from a meat hook makes me uncomfortable. It also makes me realize how similar a baby looks to a rotisserie chicken. However, I think this baby loved Anne Geddes. It's posing with that hand in what will someday be its hair. Did Anne Geddes hate that baby, though? Of course she did. You don't take a baby you like and flap it around on a hook for art. Anne Geddes hated this baby.

You can sort the children I theorize Anne Geddes hated into two categories. There are the low effort babies that maybe she didn't necessarily hate, but she'd run out of good ideas for. Maybe her intentions toward the snail baby were pure.

There are only so many cute animals, and when you're making your 15th coffee table book called 136 Pictures of Babies I Can't Believe You're Still Paying Me For; you're out of animals. You're not going to burn a couple of pages explaining to people what a pangolin is so that they can appreciate how you've rolled a sleeping baby up like one. Eventually, you've got to dip into the ugly animals. I'm pretty sure that's what happened with the snail baby. The rat babies were intentional, though; and so was the time she shoved a baby into a birdhouse.

She has also been known to simply slather children in mud and then force them to hug because the line between art and crime is paper thin when you think about it. The mud kids and the clown kids could have a very specific support group today.

All of those photos could be from days when Anne wasn't feeling it. We've all phoned it in at our jobs and said, "We're not doing an elaborate set today, just slather the children in mud, or stuff them into this old birdhouse, or something, people will love it." Those photos aren't acts of malice, but the hat photos are.

You might be thinking, surely these hats were photoshopped onto those poor babies. That's far too much hat for a baby. Hell, I don't know if I could handle that much hat, and my neck is fully developed. I watched some behind the scenes footage of an Anne Geddes photoshoot, and there's definitely a scene where she forces a big acorn hat onto a crying baby.

For what purpose does the baby need to wear a hat? Oh, so Anne can make it look like a terrifying human-faced bird person from Greek mythology? That does seem like a pretty good reason to wrangle the baby into the hat to me. The world needs to fear bird people more, and I don't think Egg Baby is quite getting the job done.

She put two hats on those babies! And they're too young to distinguish fantasy from reality, so they think they're birds now. These babies have no clue what's going on, but they know no one should be forced to wear a hat with a smaller hat glued onto it. So, if only for that reason, they hate Anne Geddes. All the hat babies hate Anne Geddes; that's a known fact.

If you're wondering what Anne is up to today, her work has fallen out of favor, primarily due to people being able to get a 24/7 cute baby fix from all of their friends on social media. We're actively trying to escape the flood of cute baby pictures now. Her most recent work to spark news was the Mother's Day  NFT collection she produced. She also recently made a piece based on that island where creepy doll heads keep washing up.

I would like to think that babies everywhere are safer due to the decline in demand for Anne Geddes work. In reality, I think Anne Geddes cultural impact is such that there are now millions of Anne Geddes all over the world hunting for babies to cram into birdhouses for Instagram likes. No baby is safe from Anne Geddes, and no person is safe from Egg Baby. It’s still out there somewhere!

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