Bloody and bawling, they emerge from the womb to take a first, momentous breath.
These intensely intimate photographs capture birth in its raw glory as each baby is delivered by caesarean section, lifted from its mother and held to the light.
Taken by French photographer Christian Berthelot,each frame is shot within the child’s first 20 seconds of life.
The 38-year-old from Brittany, France, started project just six months after his own son was born.
Dr. Jean-François Morienval, an obstetrician in the hospital where his son was born, asked Christian if he would be interested in taking a series of portraits on the profession of midwifery.
After a long discussion, the pair decided that the best solution would be for Christian to join the doctors and nurses in the theatre while the child was being born through c-section.
The planning needed to undertake the project then took six months, with Christian needing training to work in a surgical environment, requests for permission to take photographs in the clinic and requests for permission to take photographs of the mothers.
He also needed prepare mentally for what he was going to be seeing.
Christian said of the first time he was in surgery to take the photos: ‘I thought back to the birth of my son. The whole team was there and attentive.
‘The doctor watched me from the corner of his eye, to see how I would react if I was going to faint or run away. And I did not even know how I felt.
‘So I hid behind my camera and I did my job.’
Christian continued: ‘Everything went very quickly. It was a big slap in my face. I made photographs throughout the duration of the surgery.
‘When everything was over and everything was fine, I went home. I drank coffee and waited several days.
‘I knew I was not going to look at the world the same way.’
After taking the five pictures that the doctor asked for over a period of weeks, Christian realised that the photographs they had worked on together provided a unique way of looking at birth.
Since then, he has gone on to photograph more than 40 different babies in the first few seconds outside the womb, which is now being shown at an exhibition in Paris called the CESAR series.
He said: ‘My perspective on the birth has changed. I discovered the dangers of birth.
‘It is for this reason that I have decided to show the beginnings of a new human being, during the first seconds of his life. I am interested in those first seconds only.
‘And what continues to amaze me is that it never stops. With each passing moment, a child is born, from all over the world, all the time, births never stop.
Christian acknowledges that some people might find these pictures difficult to look at, but he says that he sees beauty when he looks at the images.
He said: ‘I know there are people who react very badly, who find it disgusting, they tell me that I do not have the right to show the children in the bloodstream, some even told me that it is not real, it is not true.
‘This is absurd, children are not born in cabbages or roses.
‘And there are those who are fascinated, I give them the opportunity to observe in detail the violence of birth.
‘But there are also people like my wife, who encouraged me to do this work, because c is beautiful birth.’
CESAR is being be shown in France during the Festival Circulations’ Festival Circulation Exhibition from January 24 to March 8, 2015 at Centquatre, 5 Rue Curial, Paris.
