Babies ( Images | Introduction | Print Sales )

"You can only be a baby once. Just one time. So that's why it's fun to play babies."
Emma, 4 years old.

It began like this:

The car broke down and had to be towed. A freelance job I wanted had cancelled. Dirty dishes were in the sink, we needed milk from the store, and a supper had to be cooked. My two year old daughter, Emma, was jumping around the house like a monkey; singing, talking, asking questions, getting into things.

I was exhausted.

I suddenly realised there was silence; that I hadn't seen or heard my daughter for at least two minutes.

I found her sitting on the floor of her room, placing tiny toy chairs and dolls around a paper plate. On the paper plate were small, blue and pink, rubber dinosaurs. Completely absorbed, she talked to herself, arranged and re-arranged the dolls, gave them each different voices, invented conversations.

"Well, Daddy, the babies are having a Birthday Party. The mommy is watching, and the babies are eating dinosaurs!!!" "Eating dinosaurs?" I asked, and burst out laughing.

Her idea of a good birthday party made me delirious with joy. Later that night, after she was asleep, I photographed the scene of rubber dinosaurs and dolls. I wanted to preserve something of her childfulness; that exuberant, unlimited, magical spirit all children can have.

On and off, for the next ten years, I continued to photograph her games, her adventures, her play with toys, and she would tell me what she was playing, sometimes letting me play along.

Emma, age 13: "It's like, when you're little, everything you want to have happen in your little dreams and stuff, you play out.

You just have this really big imagination, and you play everything you feel.""Everything that's weird or interesting, anything that happened to me, I would play with the babies." "But then, when you get older, you realise that you'd rather make them happen for yourself, instead of having them just come out in your play." "I think schools plays a big part in killing your imagination, because it's so centered in academics, and learning how to do this and that. It never leaves any room for imagination, because if you imagine something the teacher will say, but that's impossible, that's not realistic,…when it's better if things aren't realistic, I think."

"Maybe, in a way, when you're a kid, you're better off. Because you can figure things out when you play with little toy animals."

The series is a collaboration between Jerry and his daughter Emma. Each print is inclusive of the image and text, which was written by his daughter Emma when she was 14.