You Must See These Incredible Portraits Of Sleeping Parents-To-Be
Sleeping in the same bed, about to be awakened by a baby. (Photos: Jana Romanova)
Like many women in their late 20s, photographer Jana Romanova found that all of her friends were suddenly having babies. “All the talks were about babies, home repairs, and how their lives would no longer be their own,” she says on Medium. Grappling with this shift in her own life, Romanova began photographing parents-to-be in a very unique and specific setting: early in the morning, sound asleep.
The series began accidentally, with a shot of two of her friends, taken a month before their daughter was born. With all the anticipation and anxiety around the imminent birth, she says, “here, I’d found a moment in which parents were in complete rest (or maybe exhaustion?) together.” Soon, she was reaching out to more acquaintances and even complete strangers in her home country of Russia.
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Each photo in her project, Waiting, evokes an astonishing intimacy, revealing details that prompt as many questions as conclusions. It shows the singularity of each of these couples in the middle of such a universal experience. At the same time, Romanova captured “the way young families live in big cities of modern Russia, 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the country that will be known to their children only from history books.”
The photographer hopes to release this beautiful series as a book this year, and is currently raising funds for publication. We’re thrilled to share Waiting with you here, and hope you’ll support the crowdfunding campaign and spread the word.
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To capture the portraits, photographer Jana Romanova arrived early in the morning, before the couples woke up.
She’d be let in by one of them, then sit in the kitchen and have a cup of tea while waiting for them to fall back asleep.
Using a ladder, she’d adjust equipment as quietly as possible.
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“Being atop the ladder is the most anxious part — waiting, in a room with sleeping people,” she says. “Waiting, for a couple to turn. Waiting, for a blanket to move from a belly.”
Often, she’d have to wait for the couples to naturally shift into poses that fit well in the frame, noting that sleeping people only change position every 20 minutes or so.
Once, a woman forgot to inform her husband that Romanova was coming to take the photo. He woke up to find her hovering over the bed and went back to sleep, assuming it was a dream.
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There were pets to contend with, too. Often Romanova was confronted by a protective dog, displeased to see a stranger in its masters’ bedroom.
Romanova found the “symmetry” of the way the couples fell into poses to be part of the charm.
In addition to glimpsing intimacy between two people, Romanova’s photos create closeness between subject and viewer. “I captured moments when people don’t care about their appearance, and they are natural,” she says.
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“From the very beginning,” she says, “I had a goal to photograph 40 couples, resembling 40 weeks in pregnancy.”
“I was lucky to find really open-minded people who would agree not only to let a stranger into a house, but also to stay asleep while this stranger is climbing the ladder, making noise, holding a camera right over their heads and — waiting.”
In publishing a book, Romanova says she hopes to preserve Waiting as “a document of time, a reason for nostalgia, an object for admiration and as evidence of human beauty and openness.”
By Kelsey Miller
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