Pure

Rating:
Summary: WOW.
Review: WOW. I liked the "babies-in-flowerpots" Anne Geddes, so I picked up her new book Pure. It's stunning. The babies and the women are just breathtaking. This book seems to be a departure from her previous stuff. For one thing, besides babies, it also explores and celebrates pregnancy. (Anne Geddes even makes stretch marks look beautiful--one photo of a very pregnant tummy is taken from an angle that shows the pattern of the woman's stretch marks like the markings on a tiger or the stripes on a watermelon, or the whorl of hair on Geddes's birds-eye-view photos of the tops of babies' heads.) My favorites are the photos where images of babies are superimposed on images of women's bodies, showing how they fit inside. There are even a couple photos showing babies juxtaposed against images of pelvic bones and spinal columns. It's really illuminating. But mostly it's just beautiful.

Rating:
Summary: Pure baby meat.
Review: Yes, babies are depicted as fresh meat in many of Anne Geddes' books. That's why there are photos of them suspended in swaddles from a metal meathook or shoved naked into body stockings like sausages or piled on top of each other like hamburger patties...an apt metaphor for the baby-hungry.

This is pure maternal porn designed to filfull the most profound carnal fantasy of producing offspring: newborn heads coming straight out of "vaginal" symbols, vein-ribbed engorged breasts, and angel-like models pretending to be pregnant and in a kind of trance with live babies held captive against their bellies.

Having babies may be a very intoxicating and life-altering experience for many women, but that's not what childbearing is really all about in first place. So this book may be a little creepy to some viewers for this very reason.