Where I was Born

Birth changes more than a body.

It transforms the meaning of a space forever.

A bedroom, a bathroom, a quiet corner of a home—ordinary places become part of a family's history. Long after birth, these rooms continue to hold memory: the anticipation, the intensity, the vulnerability, and the first moments of meeting.

Where I Was Born began from my desire to document not only birth itself, but the intimate relationship between women, memory, and place.

As a birth photographer, I became fascinated by the atmosphere that lingers in a home in the days following birth. Spaces are no longer just rooms—they carry the emotional imprint of what unfolded there. A bed becomes the place where a mother first held her baby. A doorway recalls the rhythm of labour. A living room becomes the place where a family imagined welcoming new life. The home itself feels changed.

Through this ongoing fine art documentary series, I photograph mothers in the spaces that became part of their birth story, usually within the first days after birth. Some are photographed where they welcomed their baby into the world. Others return to the place where they had hoped to give birth before birth took an unexpected path. Together, these photographs explore the tenderness, transformation, and lasting connection between memory and place.

Photographed entirely on analog film, the project embraces imperfection, softness, grain, and texture—qualities that echo the fragile and fleeting nature of postpartum memory itself.

This project is not about celebrating one kind of birth over another.

It is about the places that hold birth stories.

The rooms where families prepared, laboured, adapted, grieved expectations, celebrated beginnings, and met their babies for the first time. Whether birth unfolded exactly as planned or took an unexpected turn, these spaces became part of the story and remain woven into the family's memory.

Where I Was Born sits between documentary and fine art, preserving these deeply personal spaces as visual archives of birth, motherhood, and family beginnings.

Kate third baby