Emilia Bergmark-Jiménez

Since 2021, Emilia Bergmark-Jiménez has been photographing births in Sweden, each with its own unique circumstances and process. Fotografiska's exhibition To Be Born and to Give Birth shows birth in every stage, a journey into the most intimate space and greatest moment of humans, a place where everything changes and the clock restarts. But it is also a journey into Emilia herself, a baptism through the amniotic fluid and a reckoning with the fear of birth, both er own fear and society's. A story about the existential aspect of delivering a child and about becoming and being human.

Emilia’s life changed when she was hired to film and photograph a birth for an advertising campaign. Standing in the delivery room, she was overcome by memories from two years earlier, when she had given birth to her own child. The answers she had been searching for were there — in the room where children are born. That space, the people within it, and their stories became the beginning of her personal project Swedish Births, which has since led to this exhibition.

The photographs are accompanied by stories in which the photographer shares her thoughts, feelings, and the questions that arose throughout the project. In doing so, she guides the viewer through the different stages and moments of childbirth — those that mark the beginning of both life and parenthood.

Where do we go to bring our children home?

It happens in every labour, at some point, that the birthing person disappears.
The one meeting your gaze is no longer a person, but a surging force.
I still haven’t found the right word for it — descriptions like “primal” or “elemental” grate on me.
Maybe because the words themselves aren’t beautiful.
Maybe because the force is more like a spatial state, a shift in consciousness.

Some grow silent.
Others roar.
Where do we go when we drown in our own screams?
Where do we go when we dive deep into ourselves, when we cross the line of what we thought we could endure — past the edge of our own fear?

We do all of it to bring our children back from that place, far within us.
What fills the eyes when the person behind them is no longer there — when the self steps aside, just for a moment?
We move downward, outward, away.
Beyond the spatial, the physical, the psychological.
Far outside, and yet straight into ourselves.

As if we were part of space itself — our energy eternal in the universe, and the universe’s energy eternal in us —
these two extremes exist at once:
the body’s deepest, most hidden corner
and the unreachable vastness of the cosmos.
That is where we go to bring our children back.

— Emilia Bergmark-Jiménez

This exhibition has been produced by Sofia Liljergren, Exhibition Manager at Fotografiska Stockholm, and curated in cooperation with the artist and Maarja Loorents, Head of Exhibitions at Fotografiska Tallinn, together with the local exhibitions team. The exhibition is on view at Fotografiska Tallinn from 10 October 2025 to 8 March 2026.