Lament

     I'm in a couple of different photography groups and in one of them we have monthly challenges. This month's challenge was "Birth". I decided to take a different approach to this and thought that I would share what went through my mind while creating this.

    I had this image in my head for a while and this challenge pushed me a bit to go out and do it. Plus, I finally had a day off and it was really nice and warm out for "winter". I decided to interpret this challenge by changing the word from "Birth" to it's opposite... "Miscarriage". Now, I've never been pregnant but I do know people that have miscarried and it's not something I wish on anyone or would ever want to experience.

     Instead of doing this in a sterile background I made it in nature. It symbolizes the life all around the baby which would be the mother (mother nature). There are 3 bodies on the ground to signify the 3 trimesters in a pregnancy. The first in the background is in the fetal position symbolizing the fetus. The second in the middle-ground symbolizes the actual birth(miscarriage), while the final body is in the upright position of being carried away to the morgue. I chose a red dress because red is very symbolic for life and death which I've used before in my work. The bodies are covered in a white sheet to symbolize that they're seeds that never made it into the egg.

     As far as the title goes, I went through a lot of thinking with this one. I even had other people try to help me re-title my image because I didn't like "Death by Birth" and straight up "Miscarriage", so I went with the emotion of losing a child which would be mourning. More poetically for me would be "Lament."