It’s a freezing December day in New York, but inside Anne Geddes’s photo studio in Chelsea, it’s spring. The air is warm — warm enough to make you want to fall asleep — and smells of freshly potted petunias. Geddes, the blonde, 68-year-old Australian photographer who shot to fame in the ’90s with her snaps of newborns sweetly cuddled up in flower pots and wheelbarrows, is at it again.
Today’s assignment: shooting a campaign for Wave Gardening, a global purveyor of petunia plants in signature shades like Rosy Dawn, Plum Vein, and Berry Velour. The brief is simple, classic Geddes: The company wants babies dressed up like petunias sitting in flower pots.
Back in 1996, before baby photos became a renewable resource on Instagram, Geddes went proto-viral with Down in the Garden, her first coffee-table book filled with photos of babies lounging in different fanciful flora-and-fauna setups. There were babies dressed as peas in pods; babies peeking out of watering cans with flowers on their heads; babies sleeping sweetly in gauzy chrysalises, waiting to become babies wearing butterfly wings. Oprah Winfrey hosted Geddes on her show shortly after the book came out, “and it just went right up the New York Times’ best-sellers list,” Geddes says. Parodied on shows like Friends and The Office, she became a meme before anyone used the word.
Today the photographer is wearing a striped oxford, black beanie, and a pair of jeweled ladybug earrings that she says she bought after the success of Down in the Garden. All told, her books and calendars have sold millions of copies.
But that was the ’90s. Coffee-table books are not making anyone rich today, and amateur photographers the world over have offered the public all the baby photos anyone could ever need. Geddes now has multiple streams of income to keep her business going. She recently launched an online class, Learn How to Photograph Your Baby at Home, which promises to teach parents how to capture Geddes-esque photos of their newborns with iPhones and some basic household objects. (It’s $299 for seven prerecorded video lessons but currently on sale for $99.)
I personally have never felt the call to dress my 15-month-old up like a cabbage, but I do take pictures of her almost constantly. At the end of the day, I find myself scrolling through my camera roll in an attempt to determine whether any of the shots of my perfect cutie are “good.” They’re usually not. With a few easy adjustments, Geddes promises, I could improve my average.
But the best way to capture a Geddes-eque baby photo is to hire the photographer herself. When we meet, she has just returned from a first-class trip to Dubai to photograph a private client’s new baby with the works: butterflies, flower petals, dusty-pink gauze for days. Geddes is loath to disclose the identities of such clients, but her publicist and agent, Ann Lawlor, reveals that the parents of the infant found her by Googling “the best baby photographer in the world.” (Geddes sometimes photographs known entities, too: Model Chanel Iman and Dancing With the Stars couple Maksim Chmerkovskiy and Peta Murgatroyd have both shared Geddes family portraits on Instagram.) Geddes declines to share her rate, but a Geddes production can quickly become expensive — she once pegged the cost of producing a calendar of 12 images at $200,000 to $300,000.
Geddes benefits from ’90s nostalgia, too: Loewe featured some of her photos from Down in the Garden in the social campaign for its fall 2024 collection. And she has racked up over 100,000 followers on Instagram with videos taking fans “behind the scenes” of some of her “world famous” images, like one of a baby sleeping on top of a pumpkin.
“Babies,” Geddes says, “are a universal language.” That’s why people remain interested in her work, and why baby photos have such a stronghold on social media, she thinks. “Everyone loves their babies.”
Geddes developed her signature aesthetic some 40 years ago in New Zealand, where her TV-producer husband, Kel Geddes, was recruited to launch a new TV network. While there, Anne developed a reputation as a skilled family photographer. Her first subjects were her own daughters, Stephanie, now 40, and Kelly, now 38, who are both photographers themselves.
“I’ve done my 10,000 hours,” Geddes says plainly, recalling the years she spent shooting portraits of children of all ages. When she was in the thick of it, she decided to spend one day a month doing something “for myself.” And “that’s where the image of the babies in the cabbages came to be,” she says.
Photographing 15 different infants for the Wave Petunias campaign, then, is old hat. The babies are all about six months old, which Geddes proclaims to be the perfect age to capture: old enough to sit up in a flower pot, but not so advanced as to stand up and fall out.
“They’re just sitting, and they’re really happy about that because they’ve been looking at the ceiling for six months,” she says. And “their heads are still too big for their bodies, so they’re very photogenic.”
Geddes’s stylist, Melissa Corchado, has spent weeks hand-dyeing tiny silk crêpe baby hats to match the exact shade of Wave’s petunia petals. Today’s first subject is Sloan, a smiling brunette bundle of joy who wears her Berry Velour petunia hat with ease. Geddes carries her into the shot herself, to build trust. An enthusiastic production assistant named Ivan waves a red balloon tied to the end of a boom stick to guide the baby’s attention, while Geddes steps behind the camera and starts snapping. She doesn’t coo or make funny faces, but instead projects an air of serious, quiet calm as her eyes flick from the camera to the monitor to Sloan, who appears happily bewildered.
All told, Sloan sits in the pot for five minutes, as her parents, two mid-30s professionals from New Jersey named Ben and Lauren, look on in awe. As soon as Sloan starts to whimper, Geddes yells cut. As a rule, she won’t photograph a baby who is crying or otherwise displeased with the situation. “Anne will not allow a baby to be uncomfortable,” Lawlor says. “The poor mothers are like, ‘Do it again, she’ll calm down.’ Anne goes, ‘No.’”
Mom and Dad scoop Sloan up, and Corchado waves a UV-light wand around the flower pot to disinfect it for the next petunia, a blondie named Caroline.
Despite her near-flawless performance, Sloan is not a baby model. Lawlor explains that Geddes prefers to photograph amateurs — she strongly believes that “all babies are cute.” But casting for these kinds of projects is tricky: If you announce an open call for babies to be photographed by Anne Geddes, you get a lot of weirdo parents. So Lawlor found most of the models for today’s shoot through friends of friends.
Ben and Lauren say they heard about the opportunity on a private mom’s Facebook group and eagerly submitted a photo of Sloan to be considered. “I remember my dad got my grandma a big coffee-table book by her for Christmas, and we spent a whole day with my extended family looking at it, like, amazed,” Ben says.
“Growing up, we had the calendars,” adds Lauren. “We were just thrilled. Like, it’s the biggest baby photographer in the world!”
But Geddes does not call herself the biggest or best baby photographer in the world. She maintains that she is simply an artist with a vision, which she plans to showcase at a retrospective of her work in Germany sometime later this year.
“I’ve never done a huge exhibition before,” she says. “It’s huge for me, because after 40 years, it’s validation that babies can be in art as well. There’s this whole train of thought that, Oh, that’s just baby photography, but it’s not.”
Veering off slightly into foreign affairs, Geddes hits upon something of an artist’s statement. “I think that the essence of my work is that once upon a time, Vladimir Putin was a newborn,” she says. “All of these tyrants around the world, they weren’t like that when they were born. That’s the message with my work, that every baby is a good person when they’re born. They’re not vindictive; they’re all just totally charismatic and innocent. I think that’s the basis of what I do.”
In her petunia-filled studio, it is hard to imagine anyone else doing quite what she does. Of the 15 babies, only one cried too much to make it through the shoot. Geddes always casts more babies than she needs to prepare for this kind of eventuality; she says she only needs ten images for the campaign. Which means that now, when she sits down to edit, she will likely have to cut four adorable petunia-hatted babies.
More than creating hyperspecific sets or calming squealing infants, this is the hardest part of the job, Geddes says: “I don’t like to disappoint parents.”