Remembering a Stillborn Child Through Photography

While writing this story I heard the same feeling described by several people over and over. It's one of emptiness. Parents of stillborn children go through months of anticipating a future that never comes, leaving them with nothing but a small body and fading memories. And it's this intangibility of the experience — how a future quickly becomes a fantasy — that drives parents to have their stillborn child photographed.

Worldwide there are several stillborn assistance groups that links photographers to parents, but Australia is unique in that we have an organisation exclusively devoted to the service. Started by two parents of stillborn children in 2007, Heartfelt is a charitable organisation providing freelance photographers to hospitals free of charge. For four years it was called the Australian Charity of Child Photographers (ACCP) until a Melbourne freelancer named Gavin Blue took over.

"My wife and I had a stillborn girl in 2006," Gavin explains. "We had a few days' notice, so we entered the parents nightmare with a few days to prepare." For Gavin, this meant arranging photos and video to "capture whatever life she had with us." He then realised later how few others had this option so began offering a photography service himself. He later found ACCP which by 2011 had begun to flounder and took the reins, starting with a new name.

Heartfelt's process works like this. When a baby is stillborn in a hospital the nurses run the parents through the available support services, including photography. If the mother agrees the hospital contacts Heartfelt, who then put out the word to local freelancers. Once a freelancer takes the job, they head for the hospital to photograph the child. This is often difficult, as Melbourne based photographer Vincent Long explains.

"Often, but not always, the fathers tend to check out a little bit. You go there and the fathers are just nowhere to be seen. Sometimes you go there and people are quite philosophical but then other times they're a complete mess." For Vincent, these are the hardest. For this reason he often won't use lights or reflectors, instead he tries to document the scene rather than perfect it. "But the hardest part is sometimes getting emotionally involved myself."

The organisation doesn't just cater for stillborn babies; they also photograph deceased children. Vincent describes arriving at a funeral parlour to find a 7-year-old girl still in school uniform who'd died from an allergic reaction. For cases like this he doesn't see a councillor but stays in contact with a number of other photographers to debrief.

Along with their network of around 250 freelancers, Heartfelt also employ ten professional retouchers. Deceased bodied often deteriorate so retouchers digitally improve the photos. This may sound tacky but it's intended to be a way to capture a child and not the body.

Kathryn Lieschke used this service when her own son was stillborn. She says her nurse explained the benefits of having portraits taken but she and her husband declined. Instead they husband took their own photos which were later retouched by Heartfelt. "When I look at these photos I just feel like that's my child. It's the only thing that we have and I can get past that fact he's dead."

This of course begs the question: what do you do with these photos? For Kathryn the answer is simple. She keeps one in her wallet, a few on Facebook, and hangs another two in her home, although some visitors find the images confronting. "I think society doesn't deal with death well and, in particular, the death of a baby," she says. "I think that's reflected in what people say about the photographs." According to Kathryn the most common response is why do you want to be reminded? Which she counters with he's my son. Beyond that she says that people react badly when they're told they're looking at a dead baby. "Quite a few of my friends have used the word shocking," she says sadly.

For Gavin, this ill-informed attitude to stillbirth is one of the reason he took over Heartfelt in the first place. He describes how the hospital staff took clumsy photos of his own daughter which came back "brutal and forensic and only added to the trauma." He says he understands repulsion but says simply that critics just don't know the experience. "And for me the photos just make it real. Over the years the nurseries get packed up and all that's left are the memories. And being from such swirled emotions, memories can fade. So having photos to me isn't just comforting, it's validating."

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