I’m ambivalent about professional baby photos. On the one hand, the newborn stage is so fleeting and they’re so tiny and adorable, why not capture the moment? On the other hand, some snaps I’ve seen are a little bit too soft focus, a tad too staged and clichéd, to feel like a truly personal memento.

The day after giving birth in hospital, we were offered the chance to have some cute if generic photos taken but baby wasn’t ‘limp’ enough and I was too wasted to decipher what this meant (i.e. well-fed and sleeping). Basically the photographer wanted a blank-canvas-baby she could rearrange in various cherubic poses, curled up on his side etc. While this can result in some very sweet photos, for a split second the technique made me think of human pyramids – but that perhaps reveals more about my warped postnatal state of mind than the photos – so we decided to leave it.

At least the UK passport office treats babies as little people – even if their approach is a little harsh (‘forward facing….babies should not have toys or a dummy, and there shouldn’t be other people in the photo’).

Something a little more intimate like this set of photos by Jenny Lewis she calls One day young in which mothers and babies are snapped at home seems a bit more authentic and so, to me at least, appealing. If only we’d been a bit more organised.

How about this?

The Perfect Housewife by Maria Konstanse Bruun (c)

It’s part of a series called maternal anxiety by photographer Maria Konstanse Bruun. A little too peculiar for the family album perhaps but at least there’s a bit more of a personal and psychological edge to them.

I suppose it’s simply a question of personal taste. Even for me, this self-portrait by the provocative Turner nominated performance artist Spartacus Cetwynd with her five month old, is a bit too much. Her son Leo-Dragan – presumably named after his two zodiac signs, traditional and Chinese  – is presented like an offering to be shared, very much alive and kicking. It’s a powerful, confrontational pose for a baby and one which sums up how she sees him: ‘I do feel he has the right to be his own person’.

(Interestingly too, Spartacus tells Lyn Barber in the accompanying interview that she subscribes to the strict routine-led method of Gina Ford ‘because it’s the only way she can get work done’. Well, who ever said all artists were hippies? But that really is another post!)

So when it comes to baby photos is there really such a thing as too cute or generic? And, in twenty years time, will anyone really care as long as we have something to look back on?