“Hellishly intense, powerful moments. Soaked in emotion, panic, fear, professionalism, all kinds of smells and colors.”
This story is as old as humankind. It begins long before anything digital, yet it is told to us in a more than moving way through the eye of digital photography. Words are superfluous here; the images say everything. And still, we cannot help but give the floor to the 33-year-old photographer Sandro Arabyan. Because he has been where men have no place unless they are doctors. The place where everything begins. Documenting the first moments in the lives of some 70 little humans.
“The miracle is that it happens at all. The miracle comes from these women, capable of this thing, before whom all we can do is bow our heads. In the end, they are the miracle.”
In the Beginning is the name of his photography exhibition, and the images you see here come from it. You can visit it until June 15 at the Rayko Aleksiev Gallery in the capital, Sofia.
“What surprised me were the tears in my eyes when I later saw what I had shot. While you are shooting, you cannot grasp what exactly is going on. There is no time for emotions, no time for anything except absolutely cold-blooded shooting. The results have to be there; there is no room for fear or disgust. You are there with a specific goal, a mission of sorts. And until it is accomplished, you are not allowed so much as a ‘peep.’”
The photos were taken at the largest obstetrics and gynecology hospital in Bulgaria, Maichin Dom (literally “Mother’s Home”). In a peculiar way, the photographer returns to the place where everything began for him too. The idea came from the hospital’s executive director, Prof. Ivan Kostov. He contacted the photographer to invite him to help make a dream come true—a photography project capturing the eyes of a mother seeing her child for the first time.
“It was very, very saturated with all kinds of emotions. In an environment like that, literally like a battlefield, I had to document the most important element, which doesn’t even have a name. The whole responsibility of everyone in the room. The anticipation of the mother who is ‘delivering’ a life into this world. And it all unfolds within 10 to 15 minutes.”
Gradually, though, things became far more colorful and many-sided. They went well beyond the mother’s first glance. The shooting lasted nearly three months in the delivery rooms and operating theaters of Maichin Dom and ended in February last year. By then Sandro decided he had seen and photographed more than enough; he was starting to repeat himself. Because of the pandemic, the presentation of the project was postponed for a long time, until it fittingly landed on June 1 this year—International Children’s Day, widely celebrated in Bulgaria.
“The aesthetics there were something totally different from everything we expect and are used to. Things turned out the better, the more I distanced myself from my own emotions in the room and from my body’s reactions. Literally. Because sometimes you feel sick, other times something smells unpleasant, a third time you are anxious, a fourth time you are sweating, because it’s incredibly hard and you don’t know how it will go.”
The photographer says the difficulties were many, partly because of purely technical aspects. Since he was extremely close to “everything that was happening,” he mostly used wide-angle lenses.
“To some people newborns look angry, to others frightened, to others defenseless, to others they look like old people. It’s very strange. Their size, compared with ours. They don’t have emotions yet. Perhaps they are closer to perfection than anyone ever gets afterward. Because nothing is demanded of them. They just have to live. But that, in turn, is the eternal motivation of everything. To live. And they are its embodiment. Of the future, of hope, of expectations. Of everything that comes next.”
Sandro Arabyan holds a master’s degree in photography from New Bulgarian University (NBU) and a master’s in photography and design from Elisava, the Barcelona School of Design and Engineering. In the Beginning is his seventh solo exhibition.
“I have photographed the end before, but photographing the beginning was a deeply philosophical question for me. And the two actually turned out to be very close…”
