Lauren Hodges has made a career out of photographing one of life’s most intimate moments: Child birth. “I love capturing real emotions in my images,” she says, “And with birth, there’s no faking that.”
Scrolling through Lophotobirth’s Instagram feed, you’ll find pregnant mothers clutching the hands of their spouse as they breathe through contractions and new parents cuddling their newborns. But one series of photos stands out among the rest. It’s a new type of intimate Hodges has captured: Lubbock families in the midst of COVID-19.
Hodges explains, “I just wanted to make a blog that’s kind of a piece of history…how this time and the Coronavirus has affected me and my family, and what I saw from going from house to house. How other people are dealing with it. It’s just important to document all the moments.”
Hodges saw a similar series from a photographer on the East Coast. She was inspired and quickly put out a call to families on her social media. “My inbox got flooded with messages and comments and everybody was like wow this is so cool, I would love to do this.”
She spent that Sunday driving from house to house. She’d send a text telling the family she was on her way and post up outside of their house, practicing social distancing of course. The families were given little instruction. They could dress however they wanted to, use props, include their pets. These were their photos. All she wanted was to capture our new reality.
“I decided to do this for free because nobody is really making money right now…I didn’t want to like capitalize off of the coronavirus,” she says.
Photography is her primary source of income and like most industries It too is at a halt. But this assignment seemed more important than money. It was a chance to document history. “I think it’s so important to document times, even the hard times, just to have something to look back on and remember and to show a piece of what happened to like our future children and grandkids.”
While completing her passion project, Hodges observed a number of shared emotions her subjects were experiencing. “I think we’ve all got this mutual fear of the unknown. I think we’re all afraid for our elder generation and our grandparents and all of that. But at the same time, we’re all just at home. We’re all just spending our time together and just trying to do the best that we can, coming together as a community to stop what’s going on. It seemed like a lot of people were not too upset to be stuck in their houses with their family and loved ones.”
