At Fotografiska Tallinn, Swedish artist Emilia Bergmark-Jiménez opened her solo exhibition ‘To Be Born and To Give Birth’, which brings the intimate and transformative experience of childbirth into public view. Through large-scale photographs and text, Bergmark-Jiménez explores how birth is shaped by social systems, medical structures, and cultural expectations, revealing how personal experience is often overshadowed by public narratives.
In this conversation, Bergmark-Jiménez reflects on fear, autonomy, and the effort to develop a visual and linguistic language that can articulate this human experience.
Your exhibition transforms one of the most private human experiences into something monumental and public. Why was it important for you to bring childbirth into the museum space?
I wanted to explore this hidden space with the tools I have – photography and writing. When I decided to make an exhibition, I wanted it to be at Fotografiska because I didn’t want it to be only a social or activist act, I wanted it to be shown as art, as high-quality photography. I don’t really see it as documentary or press photography. I used a large-format digital camera – it’s slower and harder to work with, but the images come out more like paintings or archetypes.
On an emotional level, I think viewers feel that. The images often look like paintings or statues, something that echoes throughout human life and history. It was important to me because childbirth is such a big part of life – universal and ordinary – and yet it’s so hidden and separated from our everyday experience.
Childbirth is the most natural act of life, yet in recent decades it’s become so entangled with fear. What do you think has shifted in our culture that makes fear such a dominant part of this experience today?
Fear has always accompanied childbirth. In Christian theology, the pain of giving birth is interpreted as a punishment bestowed upon women for Eve’s transgression – for eating the forbidden fruit.
In earlier times, childbirth was probably less dramatic because it took place in your home, surrounded by family or community. But today, in high-income countries, we see that as medical research improves and mortality rates go down, fear actually increases. We’ve become alienated because we no longer live collectively. The roles that family and community once held have been taken over by hospitals and doctors. And when you take birth out of a communal, cultural context, it becomes abstract and frightening.
There’s also something called the “first birth story” – the first time you ever hear about birth. If that story is full of fear or trauma, it stays with you. If it’s positive, that shapes your expectations, too.
To me, it’s a combination of the welfare system, capitalism, and patriarchy – all reinforcing the idea that a woman’s body doesn’t belong to her but to society. Of course, medicalization saves lives, which is good, but it also distances us from our own power. The challenge is to combine safety with community, culture, and emotional connection. If you go into birth feeling scared, that will affect your experience. But if you feel supported, safe, and listened to, that will affect it too – and that’s where change needs to happen.
Childbirth has become highly politicized – from abortion bans in the U.S. to debates about how, what age, and how many kids women should have. How does your work respond to the way the female body and autonomy are often marginalized?
Some people are very moved by my images, while others are frightened or even disgusted. We’re used to seeing women’s bodies only when they’re sensual, eroticized, or catering to the male gaze. When women appear as subjects – existing in their own power – people become uncomfortable. So I ask: why? What are we afraid of?
A journalist once said to me that during pregnancy and after birth, your body is no longer your own because it belongs to the baby. But I think it’s also not true that your body is your own when you’re not having a baby. Society constantly polices women’s bodies. In fact, maybe pregnancy is the one time society steps back a little and lets you be in your own space.
When I started this project, I didn’t fully believe in bodily autonomy. But after five years of working with these images and with women in labor, I truly do. It’s not easy, because others’ choices can provoke you. But that’s not your business.
If someone gives birth in a way you wouldn’t choose, that’s their context, their background. The problem only arises when someone influences others without giving them full information. Believing in autonomy means accepting complexity – it won’t always feel good, but it’s not for you to judge.
You said you’re a birth activist. What does that activism look like in practice, and who most needs to be educated about childbirth – expecting mothers, medical institutions, or society at large?
The women giving birth need it the most. They need to acknowledge that this is the most existential, formative experience they will ever have. It changes you completely, no matter how it happens.
But also, politicians – they know nothing about birth. In Sweden, they say they “follow evidence,” but they choose what evidence to follow. They promote only one kind of birth and ignore everything else.
The real issue is resources. If there were more funding, we could have diverse, individualized birth care that fits people’s needs. That’s the only way forward. We need to tax the rich and guarantee good health and birth care. That shouldn’t be considered radical. Right now, the bare minimum is seen as enough: “You lived and your child lived.” Of course that’s essential, but we can do better.
Scale plays a powerful role in your exhibition, with some photographs printed larger than life. Why did you choose to magnify certain images, and what does that scale demand from the viewer?
It was very important that some photos would be large. The image on the last wall – where the woman stands with her back to the viewer – I wanted it to be as large as a real woman, or even larger. The details are crucial: you can see every trace of blood or bodily fluid. Some photos are more about the state of the feeling or even forceful themselves, and can be smaller.
Making something that’s not erotic or conventionally beautiful this big gives it power. It gets under your skin. That photo – the one with the panties – was also the book cover. One of my friends said it’s not beautiful, and another cried and said it was the most powerful image she had ever seen. I realized I had to trust myself. Now it’s hard to imagine any other cover. That image has become iconic; it’s traveled all over the internet and all over the world.
This process taught me to trust myself and not take too much advice from others. It’s been a long journey to be able to stand so calmly in this place. Now, I feel like you couldn’t move me even if you tried.
Your photographs are paired with your own writing. Julia Kristeva wrote about birth as a rupture in language and identity – where subject and world momentarily dissolve. Does that idea of crossing between inner and outer worlds resonate with how you think about birth and your imagery?
We need to have a language for topics like this. If we don’t have a language, we can’t properly talk about these things. Birth is the most existential, formative experience you will ever have. Society plays it down because if we truly understood how transformative it is, it would change everything. The patriarchy does everything it can to keep us in the dark about this power – that we have the ability to reach these places inside of us, to give life, and to continue giving life by raising children.
During the exhibition tour you said, “Never again – I won’t photograph births again.” When did you know the project was finished?
It was the whole process. If I had just continued photographing births, I could’ve kept going. But the journey itself was what mattered. I started afraid and had to overcome that fear.
Changing my perspective – from “I’m a photographer, a career woman, I don’t want to breastfeed” to someone who truly believes in bodily autonomy – was huge.
Then came the next phase: guiding others. The editor, the curators, the families – everyone was at a different point. I had to bring them along, help them overcome fear, and stand together for this work. That was exhausting because it’s such a delicate subject. Even compared to something like war – it’s more delicate. And because there’s a lack of knowledge, I had to guide them through it.
The families were incredibly generous. They shared the most intimate moments of their lives. This project exists because of them.
Every time I presented the work, I had to confront the same societal pressures – the politics, the expectations. That made it heavy, but also worthwhile. The reactions and the longing people express for this material make it worth it. But it can only be done once. You can’t do it again when you already know the depth of it.
If there were one thing you could tell everyone about childbirth, what would it be?
That it’s the most existential, formative experience you will ever have, and society will always try to play it down. They’ll tell you it’s not as transformative as it is, because if you knew, you’d understand the power you carry in your body.
The patriarchy does everything it can to keep us in the dark about that power – our ability to give life, to raise life, to be at the center of creation. Society will never help you with that.
So hold on tight to the ones who support you, and support others in turn.
Photography by Siim Loog