This article was published 26/1/2018 (968 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a natural progression from labour and delivery nurse to birth photographer, but it was a journey that took years to unfold for Elliana Gilbert.

Over that time, she realized one was a job, while the other was a passion. One was clinical; the other was an expression of art. But both callings were bound together by one of life’s most treasured moments.

COURTESY OF ELLIANA GILBERT Self-portrait of Elliana Gilbert

"The poetry of birth, what a woman or a birthing person has to go through, what it does to a family and how you see that family transform in the space of a few hours, it’s unlike anything in the world," she says.

Gilbert swapped out nursing scrubs for a camera several years ago. Since her first post back in December 2015, Gilbert’s Instagram account, @ellianagilbertphotography, has acquired more than 17,000 followers. Not only does the account showcase her striking images, it offers followers a glimpse into the journeys she shares with her clients as they get ready to embrace the arrival of a new life into the world.

Birth photography is a relatively new niche in the Winnipeg, she says. For Gilbert, sacred art and sacred music inform and inspire her work.

"I’m looking for that sort of otherworldly, divine, higher meaning that connects us all," she says. "I’m not a religious person but I’m a spiritual person. I’m not literally looking for the divine, but in every one of my images I try to find this sort of higher connection that inspires the heart in the person in the image or inspires the hearts of people interacting in the images.

"Any time we have birth or life leaving this world, that’s when we’re closest to that higher power, whatever that is. I’m fascinated by those huge life transitions and what they mean in a bigger way."

COURTESY OF ELLIANA GILBERT

Her work has attracted the attention of the international online photography community. Most recently, she was selected as one of the Artists of the Year 2017 by lookslikefilm.com when two of her images were voted into the annual collection. The site is an online community of professional photographers from around the world.

The daughter of musically inclined parents (her father played wind instruments and her mother was a piano teacher, but she learned to play the cello instead), Gilbert was given a digital camera for her 30th birthday and fell in love with photography.

That led to the decision to leave her career as a labour and delivery nurse in 2014 and commit herself to developing her photography business. In 2016, she started working in birth photography.

"Interestingly, when I went into nursing, I wasn’t really following my heart because my heart is an artist’s heart," says Gilbert. "But I went a different way because of things that were pushing me in that direction. But it all came full circle because my time as a nurse led me (to) birth photography and birth work."

COURTESY OF ELLIANA GILBERT

This year promises to be a busy one for Gilbert. Aside from her birth photography work, she plans to put together a fine art photo book. The book will be a compilation of her photography, her own writings and personal stories her clients and online followers have shared with her. She hopes to have the book published before the end of this year.

As well, she and Alison Ritchie, a local nutritional therapist and doula, are partnering up to create Of Oaks and Owls, a service that combines Gilbert’s photography and Ritchie’s expertise in postpartum care and care of women throughout life’s transitions, specifically related to nutritional, herbal, spiritual and emotional well-being.

"We will also be launching a publication by the same name, as well as hosting local events to network women together for the purpose of community building and education," Gilbert adds. There is no definitive start date but the plan is to have the business up and running this year."

The following interview, conducted in person and via email, has been condensed and edited for length.

COURTESY OF ELLIANA GILBERT

Q: You consider yourself first and foremost a birth photographer.

A: Birth (photography) is kind of a new-ish niche, especially in Winnipeg and in this region. It’s definitely more evolved in bigger cities and other parts of the world.

Birthing is so intimate, and birth culture is changing. But I think we still feel this protectiveness and this privacy around birth — this sense of it needs to be in a hospital room and it needs to be between ‘me and my partner.’ It’s not something that needs to be talked about or discussed. We don’t even think about it. We don’t even know about it. It’s sort of ingrained from society.

I really love birth. It’s just the most real-life you’re ever gonna get. It’s just so real and so profound. The poetry of birth, what a woman or a birthing person has to go through, what it does to a family and how you see that family transform in the space of a few hours.

It’s unlike anything in the world. Being responsible for a life is so profound and that depth of meaning really speaks to me. It’s the kind of depth I want to create in my work. That’s why I feel like really good buddies with that subject matter. Because I feel I have the capacity for that depth.

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Q: Are your clients are fine with you sharing your images of them on social media?

A: Some clients are and some clients want it to be private. (The sharing of images of their likeness) is always discussed ahead of time, even before they arrive or before I go into their homes and when we look over the contract before the agreement is made. And even if they permit me on paper at the beginning, they can change their mind, I will always honour that.

Q: Considering you were once a labour and delivery nurse, you understand the biology of birthing and everything that goes into it and understanding what a woman goes through.

A: Yeah, I do and I can appreciate what the care team needs to do to help and I can appreciate what midwives do. When I work with midwives, and not just understanding and appreciating and respecting (what they do), but I also tend to fill in the cracks, tend to roll up my sleeves and help.

I’m not just that photographer in the corner. I am a doula and it makes sense to be a delivery and labour nurse. I get tactile. I’m not just into the tactile style. I literally am tactile. So, I’m not going to be afraid (to help in the delivery).

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Q: Thinking about your nursing background and your birth photography, the chicken or the egg question comes up and I’m wondering which came first for you.

A: What came first was the art. I was born in Israel. My family immigrated to Canada. I was almost five when I arrived. My first language here was art. That was how I started learning English. I didn’t speak English when I came here. I spoke Hebrew. But drawing pictures… was how (I) picked up language and talked to (my) classmates. I just drew and painted from age three, basically.

Q: When I see your photographs (the colour images, in particular), they seem very tactile… I also think Renaissance, I think Baroque. There is a painterly quality in terms of the look.

A: I’m very excited to hear you say that (laughs) because that’s what it is.

When you think about those painters, they didn’t have television, they didn’t have radio, they didn’t have the Internet. They had pigments, powders that they would mix up with oils, liquids and tinctures and they would prepare them and it would be painstaking and they didn’t have photos to work off of. They had people sitting for hours, they’d go away and come back.

Everything was slow and dedicated and light would change constantly and they would have to work around that somehow. I think about that and my brain explodes.

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Q: If someone were to ask you what is your style, what would you say?

A: I have been doing a lot of work on that because (of the) online art course (I created) with (Colorado-based photographer Keziah Kelsey). And the whole meat and potatoes of this art course that we (launched) in September is about finding your voice. Figuring out what that voice is, how to tap into it, how to go back into yourself and tap into that genuine authentic inner voice that inevitably will make your work different from everyone else’s.

Teaching has always been something I really love to do. I can help a person reach certain levels of processing the world around them. I’m more about life, the experiences, the senses.

My background in art and music both centre around sacred paintings and sacred music. When I was creating this course with Keziah, I realized that that is the running theme through my work.

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Q: The reason you gravitate towards photography is because it lets you access that more readily than drawing or painting, correct?

A: I would say so. I went through a massive block and then I left art in my 20s and that’s what made me do this 180-degree turn. I needed to do nursing, I needed to find something more down-to-earth, more grounded and more useful for society. I was just lost. I didn’t know how to be creative. I had learned all these mediums and I had learned all the styles, I had been exposed to all these other people’s work that inspired me. I was an artistic technician and I loved it. But then, I realized I was just an artistic technician and I didn’t have a vision, an artistic statement.

Q: What was the spark? What brought you back to art?

A: I realized while I was working as a nurse I was really miserable and that misery was getting worse and worse, in conjunction with having babies. (When I) had my first (child), I was so happy to be on maternity leave because I was able to just be me.

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I realized putting on the nurse’s uniform was actually putting on a uniform. A lot of nurses feel like their uniform is their skin. They are nurses by blood. You could see that. But that was not me. My uniform was just a uniform.

(During) my first maternity leave, I learned to crochet, I started painting, I started going to concerts again. (I was) reconnecting to the artistic part of me. It was like a creative renaissance in my brain and my hands started doing things again. Not putting in IVs but actually creating artistic things.

Then I had to get back to work, it was hard. It was becoming clearer and clearer — even though it was scary to come to terms with this — that a nursing career was not for me.

Q: How did your family feel about that?



A: My husband was one of the people who encouraged me to do it. That was really awesome. I’m very thankful to him. Life got complicated after that. (Laughs) It’s not easy having a business and I am not a business person. It’s been a process.

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Q: You recently photographed a couple who were going to be your first birth story for 2018. However, your first story became the first stillbirth with another couple. Was this also the first stillbirth you documented since becoming a birth photographer?

A: Yes that’s correct, I had a birth client with a January 9 due date, but on January 6, I responded to a last minute call to come out to the hospital to do photos for a family who had just given birth to their daughter, who had passed away in utero a couple of days prior.

I was not there for the actual birth. They had their time together, when she was born, and I arrived in the morning, after the baby’s mother had had a shower and some time to freshen up, and after their extended family had had a chance to collect themselves and also be there for the photos.

This was my first time documenting a stillbirth as photographer.

It was really important for me to tell the mother of this sweet baby, that her 80+ hour induction, labour and birth were completely valid and important and deserved documentation and attention and remembrance and honouring, and I hugged her, and told her she was the bravest, strongest woman I had ever met.

The look in her eyes confirmed my suspicion that she badly needed to hear these words.

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Q: What was your thought process during this life event? Your background as a nurse must have helped in this situation for you and the parents.

A: Years ago, when I worked as a labour and delivery nurse, I did have exposure to these kinds of tragedies on the unit, but it felt very different. As much as it was acceptable to show compassion and feeling, in those moments, it was still a clinical environment and workplace, and I was still responsible for many tasks involving caring for the mother, and also handling the paperwork aspects of a stillbirth. Those tasks made it hard for me to really "be in the moment" with families, and really allow their story, and their pain, to wash over me.

COURTESY OF ELLIANA GILBERT

This time, I walked in, and the tears were flowing. I cried with the family. I hugged the family. I gazed upon this sweet baby girl, I unwrapped her swaddle and took loving photos of her hands, feet, ears, face, even her sweet little baby bum.

I thought about how much her mother wanted these photos, to remember her child, after she was no longer here to gaze upon. I knew this was important to the parents and I held back the tears while I worked to snap these photos that would mean the world to them.

It was definitely the hardest subject matter I’ve ever had to photograph. But knowing how grateful this entire family was for my being there with them in that room, meant the world to me, and filled my heart in an indescribable way.

I left that building feeling, at once, depleted and weak from heartbreak, and super charged with the power of philanthropy coursing through my veins.

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Q: Within the birth photography community, there must be some discussion regarding photographing stillbirths.

A: Yes, absolutely. I am a member of a few Facebook-based birth photographer (and doula) groups and there is always a safe space reserved for those of us who have come across these kinds of tragedies.

Everyone is extremely supportive and compassionate when these topics come up, and one of the most common recommendations among peers at the end of the discussion, is to take some space for oneself afterwards, and go easy on the daily tasks of life for a while... to be OK with taking time to grieve and process, because it is important and healthy to do.

While most of these groups are online-based, and most of my birth photographer friends are people I communicate with via distance, I feel incredibly lucky to consider so many of these wonderful women good friends of mine; women I could message at all hours of the day, and ask any question and always know that someone is out there ready to listen/read/process things with me.

We are a tight-knit community and that sense of community is vital to doing this emotionally heavy work we do.

COURTESY OF ELLIANA GILBERT