FIRST PORTRAITS
At Embryo Transfer patients are shown their embryo (either at three-days old or as a five-day old blastocyst) on a monitor before it is transferred into the mother. The embryologist will ask the patient to confirm their name, which they then cross check with the name on the petri dish. Many patients use their mobile phone to take a picture of their embryo/s on the monitor - their baby’s first photographic portrait or perhaps the only photographic record.
I worked with the Embryologists to collect these images from the cameras integrated into the lab microscopes. I’ve edited and reimagined them as distant planets, as inaccessible as having a child may be. In exhibition, they are presented at the same scale as the three-month scan prints that traditionally mark the moment that couples who conceive naturally first see an image of their child.