The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Anne Geddes was the original baby-picture influencer
Famed photographer now incorporates shots from others in work.
Photographer Anne Geddes has had a long and prolific career, but she is perhaps best known for “Down in the Garden,” a 1996 coffee-table book featuring tiny babies adorably (or tweely, depending on your perspective) tucked into unlikely horticultural scenarios, as if they’re hiding by chance in someone’s flower bed.
Perhaps you’ve seen these images online, or on a mug or greeting card or calendar: the sleeping newborns snuggling into tiny pea pods, as if they are so many peas themselves; the babies wearing mouse outfits and dozing in old boots; the babies-as-butterflies, hedgehogs, cabbages, gnomes, worms, bumblebees, flowers.
There was a time when a new book by Geddes, 64, who has been called “the world’s most famous baby photographer,” could sell many millions of cop
for best new rap group, Big Boi and Andre 3000 were booed by the New York crowd. Andre’s acceptance speech lamented, “We got this demo tape, and don’t nobody wanna hear it,” as the pair was showered with jeers.
But it was also in that same speech that Andre 3000 uttered the now-iconic rallying cry: “The South got something to say.”
It’s a theme that Bradley trumpets throughout her book.
An alumna Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at Harvard University, Bradley is an assistant professor of English and African diaspora studies at Kennesaw State University, where she teaches courses on Southern hip-hop and culture, among others.
Her students, reared on the idea that OutKast’s groundbreaking “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” and “Aquemini” albums were instant successes, sometimes need a reality check.
“I’m still often having to break that idea that Atlanta has been accepted since the beginning of time,” Bradley said. “No, no, no. That isn’t the case. That’s the Atlanta you inherited.”
Along with the trails blazed by Big Boi and Andre 3000, Atlanta’s blossoming hip-hop scene included the rhymes of CeeLo
Green and Goodie Mob, of Pastor Troy, T.I. and the creation and evolution of trap music.
“I wanted to write a blueprint to have a more complex conversation about Southern hip-hop and this idea that contemporary style doesn’t stop with the civil rights movement in the South. I wanted to write the book I wanted to read about Southern rap and, me being from Georgia, of course I’m going to focus on the South,” Bradley said. “All of the artists that I used, that’s who I was listening to and growing up with, so it only felt natural.”
Bradley admits that finding a balance between her academic voice and her fandom for the music was a challenge. But she has other outlets that provide additional opportunities for her to blend her insights with musical appreciation, including the YouTube series “OutKasted Conversations” and her upcoming book from the University of Georgia Press, “OutKast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender and the Postmodern South,” featuring essays on race and gender in the South.
“I want this to be a steppingstone, not the end, of why OutKast is important,” Bradley said of her OutKast projects. “What they mean to me might be different than the next scholar. I’m from Georgia, so I can’t write about Mississippi rap or Memphis rap. But I feel like we are a collective, and so I hope the door swings open for others.”
Neither Andre 3000 nor Big Boi participated in the book. “I had to pull from the music and other people’s interviews and play detective a little bit,” Bradley said. But she hopes they’re aware of it and “get to read a little of it.”
Regardless, Bradley’s respect for the Atlanta hip-hop innovators and the wider range of “founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South” is unwavering.
“My husband asked, ‘Is OutKast still your favorite after writing about them?’” Bradley said. “I was like, ‘Child, if they weren’t, I wouldn’t have been able to finish this book.’”