Her whimsical, instantly recognisable pictures swept the globe in the 1990s. Yet she has rarely been treated with reverence. As she prepares for her first big retrospective, she discusses the secrets of her 40-year career
W
hen Anne Geddes began shooting her famous photographs, she soon learned she would need a backup baby – or 20. “Connecting with a child who considers you a stranger is high stress,” she says. “I remember trying to shoot one baby sitting in a tank of water, surrounded by waterlilies. It took five babies to make it work. One of them was even called Lily, but she was not having a bar of it. She looked at me as if to say: ‘You think I’m getting in that water?’”
She describes the practicalities of one of her best-known shots, 1991’s Cabbage Kids. It shows twin brothers Rhys and Grant with cabbage-leaf hats on their heads, each sitting in an upturned cabbage, turning to one another with mild alarm. Geddes’ assistant had tied a balloon to a piece of string, lowering it between them and whipping it up the moment they turned. Geddes got the shot.
“That whole world has changed; that income has gone,” says the 68-year-old Australian from her home in Manhattan, New York. Technology has changed everything. She calls Cabbage Kids “authentic”: “The props were all real. It was all in my garage. It’s funny; with Photoshop and AI, it makes me sad to think that if you came to my work now, you might question whether it was real.
