“Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you’re my favorite work of art …” – on snapshots, pregnancy and being pretty on Instagram

Over past twenty years, pregnancy has become publicly visible. Following the then-scandalous Vanity Fair cover of a heavily pregnant and naked Demi Moore in 1991, flaunting one’s baby-bump has become almost a rite of passage for celebrities, and through that a staple in our visual culture. Women now are managing their pregnancies in the crossfire of medical, moral and consumerist narratives, balancing these to the best of their ability to make sure they are ‘doing it right’. Photography can a means of communication, construction and memory. Images teach us how to see and limit what is a part of our world through what we deem photographable. Snapshot photography in particular is known for erasing a plethora of lived experiences and focusing on reproducing and embellishing the status quo. In this talk I will trace the tensions between cultural and people’s personal narratives of ‘doing it right’ in terms of pregnancy by focusing on images Russian speaking and English speaking pregnant women post on Instagram, a mobile image-sharing platform lauded for its incessant growth in the last couple of years. Taking and sharing selfies is often dismissed as frivolous and narcissist by the pundits, but increasing scholarship on self-expression and self-representation on social media, particularly through images, suggests that the subjectivities, practices and social use of selfies can be rather complex and deserve empirical readings. I will offer a couple that have come out of my summer at Microsoft.