clear blue
"Some years ago and in order to prepare myself for a new and desired phase in life, I started to take portraits of my pregnant friends. My longing for a new phase in my life was imbued both with melancholy, since it meant a farewell to my former life, but also with hopefulness, curiosity and strong inspiration.
My interest in pregnancy was initially primarily of intellectual character: it was the nature/cultural polemic that fascinated me. In Western countries where normative bodies should become disciplined and controlled: What happens when nature takes over and controls the female body during pregnancy? How does it affect us as postmodern women, who since our teenage years have controlled our bodies through artificial contraceptive hormones? How does it affect our identities?
It was not until I looked at the plus sign on a stick and realized I was pregnant, that I for the first time experienced the strong and overwhelming feelings of pregnancy. I had been given the most valuable gift in life; my son, even though I didn’t know anything about him at that time. I appeared as usual. I felt almost as usual. Everything around me was as usual. However, everything had in fact changed. The future was processing inside me.
I was not any longer the last link in the chain. From now on, even trivial actions would affect the new growing life inside of me. I was not any longer responsible for just myself.
The first weeks were like going through a storm inside. Both happy expectations and fear. One shouldn’t announce too early, they say. Or as my midwife slightly thoughtless approached my worries: “One should at least have had one miscarriage in life”. My body that always had been subordinated by my brain, started to demand attention. Life and death became present and for the first time in life I was totally omitted to nature.
Clear Blue is about my experiences during these confused weeks; from the first insight until the evidence; a wrinkled transcription in a sweaty hand on my way home from the ultrasound examination; a picture of a small living creature; more like an alien than a human being. But still something that had been validated by science."
Elin Berge