Mention baby photography anywhere in the world, and Anne Geddes’ name is likely to surface. The Australian native who lives in New York City has created countless cute and elaborately staged photos of newborns and small children that have appeared worldwide in calendars, greeting cards, and books for over three decades.

“I love children’s books. Some of them are so beautiful and last for generations, and it’s an art form illustrating and writing a children’s book. Our girls were at that age when we would read them children’s books all the time.

“I gradually got into doing some work for myself after ten years of photographing babies and two-year-olds. It’s hard work, but it’s joyful work, and it isn’t easy. I used to do two portrait sittings a day, five days a week, and after eight or nine years, I was starting to think that I needed some creative time for myself where you’re not photographing for a client, where they’re not smiling or blah, blah.

“So, to keep my sanity, once a month, I spent a day creating something just for me, and one of the first two images I did was of babies in cabbages. There’s a black and white image of a baby called Joshua hanging from a hook [wrapped] in some fabric. It’s a beautiful black-and-white image. I remember looking at it in the dark room and thinking; I really love this. And I don’t have to worry about what anybody else thinks. And so, it sort of started, and it was in the storybook genre.

“Down in the Garden was so successful, but the greeting cards and calendars came before it. I started to do 10 or 12 images, and people would say, ‘You should do a calendar.’ The elaborate staging of a lot of it came from being creative in producing greeting cards where you know you must do Christmas themes, Valentine’s Day, or Mother’s and Father’s Day.

“Then it led into Down in the Garden, and as any author would tell you, when you’re producing your work, writing your book or your play or your musical score or me photographing this book, you have no concept of how people are going to react to it. I had always resented that.”

Geddes (born 1956), who considers herself a storyteller, set Down in the Garden as a children’s story because that’s where she was going with all these little characters. Her tiny baby models were photographed as fairies, gnomes, sunflowers, water lilies, field mice, ladybugs, and peas in a pod in this magical and fun-filled book.

One of the reasons for its success is the images. She’s had a little baby sitting on the studio floor kissing photos of the babies in the book, but an adult sense of humor also went through there. It was wide-reaching in terms of the way people responded to it.

Next, Oprah Winfrey invited her to her show, which was when she had a book club. Geddes had never watched Oprah’s show because she lived in New Zealand at the time, and it was a daytime show.

On the show, Oprah’s carried out two little newborn babies in bumblebee outfits and did the interview. At the end of the interview, she picked up Down in the Garden and said, “This is the best coffee table book I’ve seen this year.” The book then shot right up New York Times bestseller list and took Geddes by surprise.

“I think I got pocketed [after that] a little bit within that genre, and for years I couldn’t look at the book again because I knew that I was more than that, but I hadn’t produced anything to demonstrate that,” remembers Geddes. “Kel, [husband, marketing guru, and TV executive] said, ‘You’ve got to lead your audience.’

“I said I want to do the next book, something so simple and pure. The third book Pure was what I wanted to do. But he was correct in that ‘It’s too much of a change. You’ve got to meet them halfway,’ So, my second book contained some of my most simple and classic imagery and images from the Garden book. It had some nudity, so we launched it in Europe, where they don’t bat an eyelid for much of that.”

“Even here in New York, where I shoot, you go into a blank space on the day of a shoot or a setup date and create everything out of nothing,” Geddes says. “You just bring it all together and create that world, and then it gets dismantled, and you go away. That space is a sense of possibility in my mind, possibly because I’m a Virgo, because we like control.

“For the first ten years of my career, which took me from Sydney to Melbourne to Auckland in New Zealand, I did exclusively private portraiture of families, especially children. I love little kids, as they always have this sense of promise. They’re like an open book, and the more I photographed younger and younger children, the more I wondered how beautiful they were and how exquisite a newborn baby is because of everything they represent. They are us at the very beginning of our lives. Nothing good or bad has happened to them; they’re just pure.