Embellyshing Pictures, Gifting Welfare

Mapping Contemporary Pregnancy Photography between Popular and Municipal Uses in Vienna

Abstract

English abstract: “Belly pictures” have become part of public and commercial use as well as of domestic visual and material culture. Our combination of ethnographic and historical perspectives locates such photographs between the desire of the women who ordered them to generate beautiful memories of their pregnancy today, and healthcare strategies of the Vienna municipality, which began to materialize welfare for infants as a gift for mothers in the interwar period. We flag out a photo voucher as a link between the realms of reproduction, family life, and citizenship: Belly pictures have continued and renewed the convention of visualizing the bourgeois variant of a happy family since the late 19th century. In the meantime, they literally familiarize the medicalization of pregnancy, which in this local variant encourages to take a belly picture. Such images circulate between individual pleasure, the welfare state’s biopolitical dimensions, and consumerism.