MARION SAUVEBOIS talks to photographer Clare Woolford about her life dedicated to capturing precious memories on camera for bereaved mums and dads —and how she found her way into such an unusual profession

“THE baby was so small she didn’t fit in a babygro, it wrinkled around her toes,” photographer Clare Woolford recalls, tracing the outline of the infant in the black and white picture on her computer screen.

The tiny bundle’s face is ever so slightly out of focus. In the foreground her parents’ fingers curved into a heart shape frame her impossibly small body. Her expression is still, her eyes squeezed, deep in slumber.

Clare scrolls through the album, revealing more snapshots of her crinkly little hands and curled up feet, her parents cuddling her, planting a kiss on her furrowed brow.

As far as the eye can see, these are just happy mementos of the birth of a child. And this is exactly what Clare set out to do when she was called to capture the final moments of parents with their stillborn baby.

“She is so beautiful,” adds the 50-year-old from Wanborough wistfully. “You would never know from the photograph she had died. That’s how the baby appeared to me: sleeping.”

The emotion in her voice is palpable as she flicks through each image of her first ‘remembrance shoot’ on behalf of Remember my Baby - a national charity which offers grieving parents free intimate family photo sessions to remember their baby by, whether they died before, during or shortly after birth

She had only just signed on as a volunteer when a call-out popped up on the charity’s Facebook page asking for a photographer to head out to the Royal United Hospital in Bath, where an infant had just passed away. Without a second thought she accepted the request.

“The scariest thing about it was thinking, ‘What if I’m not good enough?’,” she confides. “It was a horrible November night, pitch black. I remember when I got there, I kept texting the other volunteer photographer for the charity in the area asking advice, making sure I had everything I needed, the consent forms. I got so nervous.”

Her experience as a trained forensics radiographer and the years spent X-raying stillborns with severe defects, foetuses at various stages of development and deceased children went some way to prepare her for what was to come.

And yet, as she set up her equipment, she feared any subtle change in her expression, or flicker of sadness would betray her nerves and unsettle the child’s already distraught parents.

She felt, she says her voice dipping to a whisper, an indescribable sense of responsibility to lessen their burden.

“You know there is just one chance to do this,” she explains. “The undertakers are coming to take their baby away and you want to make sure you do it right and that you don’t add to the parents’ distress.

“But it was so sad. I saw afterwards on Facebook that the mum had had a countdown to the day was born. Then she became aware that foetal movement had diminished and stopped. She went to the hospital and they couldn’t find a heartbeat. She was so excited about the birth of her first child. My heart broke for them.

“They were so appreciative and I felt honoured and dreadfully sad at the same time. When I came home I closed my eyes and I could see was the baby. I couldn’t stop thinking about that first session. I thought, ‘Why is life so unfair?’”

Her second shoot was even more harrowing, she continues. And neither she nor the two midwives in the room alongside her were able to hold back tears as they watched the mother cling to her lifeless baby, refusing to hand it over to the undertaker.

“She started wailing,” she says softly, obviously shaken at the memory. “She was on one side of the curtain, the three of us were on the other so she couldn’t see us and we had a three-way hug. We were crying for her. It was the saddest thing.” She pauses briefly, glancing in the distance before adding firmly: “Some people say they couldn’t do this job, I can’t not do it.”

Many, she admits, dismiss her job as morbid and few people understand her motivations. The dearth of photographers in the region coming forward to support the charity, and families at their most vulnerable, is a glaring example, she observes.

For her, it is only the natural progression of a career dedicated to ensuring that those taken far too soon were treated with the dignity and care they deserved, even in death.

Witnessing time and again the cold, clinical approach of some professionals to premature deaths, from her fellow radiographers and doctors to medical photographers has always been a huge drive. One particular incident will forever be etched on her memory.

“I had started my job in London,” says Clare who trained at Princess Margaret in 1984. “I had qualified for a couple of weeks, and I took the X-ray machine to intensive care. It was for a four-year-old boy, his father had attached him. I did the X-ray and before I could take the plate out for under him, a doctor walked in, turned the life support machine off and walked out. The child breathed his last in my arms. I cried, I was heartbroken,” continues the 50-year-old who divides her time between her photography business and part-time radiographer post at a community hospital in Moreton-in-Marsh.

“I had to go process the X-rays and one of the male radiographers said, ‘You’ve got to toughen up to be in this game.’ I hissed at him, ‘If I ever get tough it will be time for me to move on.’ I’ve always thought these babies and children deserved so much more respect.”

While she describes her volunteer role as an extension of her own personal and professional crusade, she admits she never quite imagined it would lead her down such a path.

In fact, she admits, she fell into this rather unusual strand of photography by chance.

After offering to photograph a friend’s wedding the amateur eventually decided to launch her own company, Barefoot Photography. She soon branched out into baby shoots. It is during one of her many training seminars in London that she stumbled across Remember My Baby in summer 2015. By November she was en route for Bath for her first remembrance session.

The challenge now remains to spread the word and persuade nurses and midwives at various hospitals in the region, particularly the Great Western Hospital, to make parents aware such a valuable free service is available.

“At the moment GWH don’t call us. So we want to raise awareness and say to families in Swindon, ‘We’re here for you’. They have a medical photographer and I’m not knocking them in any way, medical photography is brilliant but it doesn’t convey the emotion. What Remember My Baby photographers do is not easy. But I don’t think people realise how strong humans are. The thought is so much worse than actually being there. We can all do more than we think.”

Breaking the enduring taboo surrounding child deaths is crucial, she says resolutely. Only by acknowledging it can we help parents face the lifetime of loss and heartache ahead.

“The issue of losing a baby is still taboo. But this is a baby that was loved, the mum had already bonded with her child. You can’t sweep it under the carpet and be done. I think part of it is that some parents seem to think it’s a punishment and that’s what perpetuates the taboo. It’s not parents’ fault, just Mother Nature being very cruel. I just want it to be the norm: that parents get the option to have professional photographs of their baby taken. 50 per cent will find the idea repugnant, 50 per cent won’t. I just don’t want them to go home and in two, five or ten years’ time think, ‘I wish I had done this, I wish I had a photo of my child.’ That’s why we do it. That’s why I won’t stop doing it.”

Each set of photographs is provided free of charge by Remember My Baby and retouched to remove wires, bruising and any other distressing marks. To find out more or volunteer, go to www.remembermybaby.org.uk or check the charity’s Facebook page.