Our 2023 Judge Panel is comprised of birth industry leaders, photography industry leaders, and past competition winners. In the spirit of togetherness, we have collected our most experienced judging panel in the history of this event to help support, encourage and give feedback on the images submitted to this year’s competition.
This panel will be choosing an overall 1st Place Winner, Best in Category Winners, and Honorable Mention winners. We will also be hosting a Members’ Choice awards so all members will have a chance to vote and provide feedback on images submitted.
Dora Barens is an award-winning birth photographer from The Netherlands. As one of the first birth photographers of the country, she’s been documenting birth stories since 2011 and it has become her mission to put this industry on the map in The Netherlands. Her work has been featured in countless national and international publications and she’s also a past winner of the IAPBP Image Competition.
...Dora loves to capture the emotional roller coaster of giving birth in a discreet yet powerful way. As Amsterdam’s leading birth photographer she enjoys working in the multicultural environment of the city and the quite unique Dutch midwifery care system makes her work even more interesting.
Dora is a native Hungarian but she’s living in The Netherlands with her Dutch husband and their two teenage children.
Read MoreCaroline Bologna is a reporter at HuffPost, where she covers culture and parenting. A native of New Orleans, she graduated from Brown University and is currently based in New York. She is passionate about photography, world travel, and women’s issues.
Registrar momentos inesquecíveis e cheios de amor, essa é minha missão!!!
Ash Davenport is a renowned wedding and birth photographer from London, UK. A natural-born artist and thrill seeker, Ash is constantly raising the bar with his life and photography.
...He approaches every shoot as an exciting new adventure to capture images that make you smile, cry, and laugh out loud. He is constantly observing what’s unique about the people in front of him and the love that the connects family and friends. When he is not behind his camera, he’s running marathons, swimming competitively with his Olympian brother, or trekking up Everest (for his honeymoon).
Read MoreSamantha is a Motherhood photographer with a great interest in matrescense and honouring everything it means to become a Mother. She aims to capture the raw, beautiful details along with the emotions of maternity, birth, newborn and everyday family moments.
...Samantha is a past 2019 IAPBP winner of the Member’s Choice Best in Birth Details and Best in Birth Details in the Judge’s Competition. Most notably she has been published in Midwifery Today and Dear Photographer. Samantha is honoured to be one of the judges for the 2021 competition.
Samantha lives in beautiful Kamloops, BC Canada with her three young sons and two very large, very hairy Bernese Mountain dogs.
Read MoreKimberly Kimble is an internationally published, award winning photographer and birthworker in Portland, OR. She is the face behind Rushes & Waves and a 2019 IAPBP competition winner. Self taught with 15 years of experience, she started her birth focused business in 2017 and has been photographing births ever since.
...Kimberly has also been recognized for her protest photography and is working on a creative body project called “bare”. Her work is raw and honest. She loves capturing real human emotion. When she’s not behind the lens, she is writing, adventuring, binge watching The Office and loving on her little family.
Read MoreLeilani Rogers has been documenting births for 12 years. In that time her work has won international awards and she been published and televised worldwide. Her photography has been included in exhibitions throughout Europe and her first solo show was held locally in Texas in May 2022. In 2015 Leilani began speaking and teaching publicly at Off-Call and The Baby Summit. This lead to the creation of Birthbound Photographer in 2018. Birthbound offers numerous beginning to advanced birth photography classes as well as a top notch certification program. Leilani also happens to be a Master Certification Evaluator for the National Association for Professional Child Photographers.
Jerusha Sutton is an award winning birth photographer, videographer, doula and filmmaker from Sydney Australia. She first began supporting women in birth as a doula in 2006, and added photography into her offerings in 2012. Jerusha has spent the past 4.5 years co-creating the feature film Birth Time: the documentary, with midwife Jo Hunter and actor Zoe Naylor, due for Australian release in February 2021, with the rest of the world release to follow closely behind.
...The film takes a detailed look at our current maternity system, endeavouring to ask the question, what would it take for women to emerge from their births physically well and emotionally safe?
Read MoreBelle Verdiglione is an Australian based creative, founder of the Camera Queens and pioneer in embodied Potent Identity™ Photography. Using her leadership and legacy as the example, Belle personifies what’s possible when we let our most vulnerable edges conceive new levels of creativity that truly change how we see ourselves.
...After 9 years as an award-winning birth photographer, deep personal growth paved a new path in Belle’s professional career, to elevate the power, purpose and potential of creative entrepreneurs and visionaries that bring radical rawness and authenticity to the forefront of our world.
Her work mirror’s her own fierce stand for women’s empowerment, with an importance in celebrating the identity of all women, irrespective of size, culture and age. By emulating what her previous work created for the birthing world, Belle hopes to attract widespread exposure to Potent Identity™ Photography through her role as a speaker and photography coach, to revolutionise how all humans around the world are seen in their intimate stories.
Read More
– Paulina Splechta, IAPBP Member since 2015
Your entry into the competition includes a backlink to your website. A backlink from our website to your website during this high-traffic time of year is as productive to your SEO as spending about a year consistently working on DIY SEO strategies.
The birth photography industry has come so far throughout the past decade, and our Annual Image Competition has been a huge catalyst of this change. When we work together to spread the beauty of birth, the demand for birth photography increases which can translate to more clients for YOU.
This year we will be donating a portion of our proceeds to Black Mama’s Matter Alliance, a Black women-led cross-sectoral alliance. Together, we envision a world where Black mamas have the rights, respect, and resources to thrive before, during, and after pregnancy.
Our perspective changes when we know our images will be judged by others which allows us to see our work with fresh eyes. Through community conversations and potential feedback on your images, you will learn and grow through the experience of participating in an image competition.
With your entry, your work will be published on our website and your clients will be honored! We have also added a new option this year to submit your entry for blog publication as well, so there are multiple ways to have your work published through your single competition entry.
Taking the time to pull about 10-30 images for an annual portfolio refresh is a task you should be making a priority anyway, and once you’ve done that, selecting 1-5 images to submit to the contest shouldn’t take much longer!
“I love being part of something bigger than myself and my birth photography business. I am part of changing how the entire world views birth and birth photography. It is a gift I give myself every year. ”
– Sannetta Campbell, IAPBP Member since 2014
“WOW… what I really love about this competition is seeing “new faces”! Most of these are new faces whose entries really made me stop and look!”
– Leilani Rogers, IAPBP Member since 2011
“When I opened the image competition website and saw my images there with all of these other amazing images from all over the world my heart nearly stopped. What an honour.“
– Stephanie Parker, IAPBP Member
“[This competition is] about YOU representing YOUR artistic eye on birth. YOUR moms, YOUR clients, YOUR babies you’ve witnessed born. Collectively we pool it all together and show the WORLD the absolute best in birth photography!“
– Marysol Blomerus, Past IAPBP Member
“Having my image published in print and all over the web was very overwhelming and most of all, it was humbling. This year I enter with great joy and excitement to once again being part of such a wonderful community of birth photographers around the world.”
– Natalia Walth, IAPBP Member & Competition Judge
members.
categories to choose from.
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We are proud to support Black Mamas Matter Alliance with a portion of the proceeds from our 2023 Annual Birth Photography Image Competition.
Black Mamas Matter Alliance is a Black women-led cross-sectoral alliance. We center Black mamas to advocate, drive research, build power, and shift culture for Black maternal health, rights, and justice. We envision a world where Black mamas have the rights, respect, and resources to thrive before, during, and after pregnancy.
“Help deepen the national conversation about Black maternal health in the US; amplify community-driven policy, research, activism, and care solutions; center the voices of Black Mamas, women, families, and stakeholders; and provide a national platform for Black-led entities and efforts on maternal health, birth and reproductive justice.”
– Lacey Barratt, IAPBP Member
We would like to thank the following businesses for their continued support of our association throughout 2023 and 2024. We couldn’t do this without your support!
