About Emily Santi—

Birthwork found me in the summer of 2019. I had just finished a degree in social work, and it hadn't taken long to realize it wasn't what I was meant to do. I was sitting alone in a dive bar, turning that over, thinking about changing careers, when a doula struck up a conversation with me. She was there as the designated driver for her sister, and somewhere in that conversation, she mentioned what she did for a living, and that she was pregnant herself. By the end of the night, she'd invited me to come to her own birth, if I ever wanted to see one.

A couple of months later, she called. She was in labor, and she asked if I still wanted to come. I said yes and drove over that evening. I watched a baby born for the first time. The trust she placed in me that night, a near stranger, in the room for one of the most private hours of her life, set off everything that came after. I never looked back.

What I saw that night changed something in me. Not only because it was beautiful, but because it was true in a way almost nothing else in life is allowed to be. There was no performance available to her, no version of it she could stage. She was entirely herself, and the room organized itself around that fact.

Most of what happens in that room, nobody ever sees. It happens behind a closed door, and then it's over, and the world moves on to the baby, the announcement, the first photo in a hospital blanket. The labor itself, the hours of real work a body just did, gets skipped over. I don't think it should be. I think it's some of the hardest, most honest work a person will ever do, and it deserves to be witnessed, not just survived.

After that night, I enrolled in doula training. I earned my postpartum doula certification by the end of 2019, and my labor and birth doula certification the following year. I spent the next four years working through agencies, learning the work from the inside, while I built my own business alongside it. In 2021, I certified as a birth photographer too.

Being a trained doula changes how I read a room. I know what transition sounds like. I know when to lift the camera and when to set it down and hold a cup of water to a mother's mouth. Those are not competing jobs to me. They are the same attention, pointed in two directions.

Birth is physical. It involves blood, effort, and a body doing the hardest work it will ever do. I photograph that plainly. I am not interested in cropping the labor out of birth photography and leaving only the swaddle. That labor is the part I think deserves to be remembered most.

A near stranger trusted me with the most private hours of her life, and it changed everything. Every family since has trusted me with the same, hours most people never let anyone see. I have never taken that lightly, and I never will. I photograph them because I believe that work deserves to be recognized, documented, and celebrated, not skipped past on the way to the nursery photo.