This story was written to support my A2 level submission at Sheffield College in 2010. It is a story about my daughter, Laura Chloe Jeeps, who died of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia aged 19 weeks on April 15th 2007. I want to remember Laura in pictures as well as words so this collection of images and the story will try to do that. This is also the story of Laura’s mum, Sarah, and her older sister Emily.
I bought my DSLR shortly before Laura was born so I could record her growing up. I took plenty of pictures of her but after she died I have been using my camera pretty much all the time so for me the story of the last 3 years is one of images as much as words. For the assignment I wanted to describe mine and Laura’s lives before, during and after her short life. I wanted to show pictures of some of the places where Laura went, some of the people she met and so on. I could also research imagery used by other people in similar circumstances or through the ages. How does society use imagery to record the death of children ? How have families used imagery to keep their memories of lost children ?
This is a tragic story and people find the death of a child difficult if not impossible to talk about. It is very rare these days for people to know a child who has died or even a family whose child has died because – at least in ‘developed’ nations – children are far more healthy and are far more likely to live healthy lives. There is still a child diagnosed with a leukaemia each week at Sheffield Children’s Hospital though.
Timeline
In the autumn of 2005 we decided that we wanted to have a baby We talked about this over a meal in a restaurant in Paris where we had gone for a long weekend and being very organised people we made up a plan on the spot. This plan was full of innocent to-do lists about finances and mortgages. In February 2006 Sarah told me she was pregnant.
From then until she was born in Jessops in Sheffield at 21:54 on November 29th Laura was very busy and well-travelled; this included trips to Amsterdam to a David Bowie fan club party and later to the World Cup in Germany. She also saw the Rolling Stones and Morrissey in Sheffield.
Places
The places that we visited while Laura was alive were limited but because of that they have become more precious. She was born at Jessops Hospital in Sheffield and she died in the Children’s Hospital next door so both hospitals are important places for us as well as for the other thousands of families who have suffered similar happiness and tragedy as we have.
For me my most important place is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park at West Bretton. This was where Sarah and I went on our first date and we had been there several times subsequently as well as with Emily. We took Laura to some children’s’ clothes shops up the M1 in Otley and stopped off at the YSP on the way for a break and a nappy change. I have my name on the ‘Walk Of Life’ at the YSP and had also had a friend’s daughter’s name added to it when she was about a year old.
So when we went to the YSP in July 2007 after Laura died I asked about adding her name to the walk. It turned out that the engraved walk was full but they suggested I look at a bench. I hadn’t thought about any sort of physical memorial but I knew that this would be the perfect place for me to remember Laura and for other people to see her name and think about her.
I went back later in the summer and had a tour with one of the wardens and chose a spot up the hill about a mile and a half from the main entrance. The warden arranged for the bench to be made and the carving added and it was ready in September so I went there with my sister and brother-in-law to see it for the first time. I have been back many times since then and this was an obvious choice for a visual focus for this assignment. When I talked to my tutor about it he suggested that I visit the bench during the course of the A2 year and take photos during the seasons.
By now I was thinking of people and places as two of the themes for my project and soon the third ‘P’ fell into place – possessions.
Possessions
Laura wasn’t with us for very long but in that short time and afterwards we have a house which is full of her memories and some of her possessions and some of ours that relate to her. I look at these possessions every day as I pass them and some of them I keep with me and take away if I go anywhere. Emily and Sarah are the same; we each have our items which we care about.
One of these is a small silver pot we bought in the Famous Sheffield Shop on Ecclesall Road. We bought this shortly after Laura died and Sarah keeps it by her bed with Laura’s tiny plastic birth bracelet in it.
The bracelet is very important because it was the first physical manifestation of Laura apart from Laura herself. It symbolises for me the moment she entered my world and on the days when I struggle to even remember what Laura looked and felt and smelled like I can see that bracelet and say “Yes she did exist and with this tiny bracelet I can prove it”.
The night Laura was born I held her while they went away to patch Sarah up and I told her all about her big sister and her house and bedroom we had ready for her and all the David Bowie albums she would grow up listening to and Queens Park Rangers the football team I would take her to see. I probably told her more but these are the things I remember very clearly from that night.
Bears and other animals are very important in our house. Emily has amassed a large collection of animals and of course Laura was presented with a small army of soft toys when she was born. My tutor showed me a photo he had made of his daughter’s animals so I recreated that shot with some of Laura’s friends. They all live together in Laura’s bedroom around her changer.
At Easter weekend in 2007 we took Laura to town and I bought her a small lamb who we called Sam the Lamb; the following weekend Laura died so this particular animal means the most to me. When we had a party to celebrate Laura’s life and to remember her I asked my sister to trace a shop in York where they made really intricate cakes and decorations and we picked several of Laura’s animals to go on to the cake.
As it happened the shop couldn’t help us but a colleague of my sister helped out and made the cake and the animals for us based on some photos I emailed to her. We have kept the handmade animals at home. This was an early example of where I was using my photography to remember an aspect of Laura’s life for others who had never met her but that didn’t cross my mind at the time.
The final animal in this story is Bill the Bear; he came from a very upmarket toy shop in Paris when I went there about 5 months after Laura died. I bought him for Emily but she has never taken to him so he stays with us.
While on a business trip to Edinburgh in November 2009 I came out of Waverley Station and saw this very striking poster. I thought the image was very shocking which was obviously the intent although when I looked for some information about the agency and the campaign most of the industry commentators felt this was a hackneyed theme and had been used too often before for campaigns for Barnardos, the RSPCC and so on.
What I liked about the image was how simple it was and how it would strike home to any parent what it might be like to come home to an empty cot or a room of toys without their owner. I was struggling with ideas of how to construct some meaningful images for my A2 project and this one was so powerful because it struck a chord with me knowing what it is like to see an empty bedroom with an empty cot every day. Bill the Bear was perfect for these photos.
Since taking pictures of children growing up is now so generic it was hard to find any literature on the process and artistic outcomes for the genre. There are however plentiful examples of the very modern approach which is popular now for commercial family photographers and it is interesting to compare and contrast the approach taken for the ad campaign with the very cute style of a globally popular children’s’ photographer.
Having explored a couple of themes, the places and possessions tracks were going fine but the people one wasn’t going as well. I had emailed some of the senior medical staff at the Children’s Hospital who had looked after Laura and although they said they were happy to help with my project it proved impossible to find any sensible way to make arrangements to take any photographs of them.
I was keen to do something around what such people do when they are not faced with the dramatic decisions they have to make every day and I will find a way to do this one day ! What I didn’t want to do was to push my way in to these people so that I lost their interest; the nature of their work also means that there are many constraints on what they can and can’t do in or out of the hospital premises.
The photo of the woman in the nurse uniform was found in a book called ‘Uniform’ by Oliver Snoad. What I liked about his self-published book is that the viewer has no idea about whether the subject is in that uniform solely for the photographer or whether it is her daily uniform and she just wanted to be photographed away from a hospital.
What I wanted to do in the second half of the A2 year was to bring some of the themes together and while I was researching some sources for photography of dead or lost children I came across an amazing French photographer’s website. She had taken a series of images of parents and relatives who had lost their children either before birth or very shortly after. I think the work was commissioned for a French charity which helps such parents and families. What I liked so much about these photos was how they were very simply presented but with so much gravity and emotion that the viewer would have been able to describe the context without any need for a narrative. I knew that this was a route that I wanted to recreate since it matched perfectly the records of possessions that I had been working on.
It seemed obvious to me that the photographer had asked her subjects what they wanted to be photographed with and they had come up with the same things I had; small or insignificant objects that most people would take for granted but which were their only links with their lost children; a pair of shoes, a handprint, a soft toy. The photographer had also used what I thought was a very striking mix of black and white and colour images.
The images were elegantly presented but with much tenderness and I thought this would be an excellent model for me to follow with my own work on the possessions theme. I therefore had several attempts at making my own images in a similar style both in colour and monochrome. Since I am using a modern DSLR I can rapidly collect a large number of very high quality images so all my images of Laura will be preserved as clean and sharp digital images for endless revision in years to come (in theory anyway).
Looking at pictures of my own family which I have been collecting and scanning for context to this project the first thing that strikes me is how the majority of them are in black and white and to our modern eyes look very dated. The oldest picture I have is of my grandfather with his parents and this picture was probably taken around 1900. Stanley Garner Jeeps is resplendent in his button boots and dress frock but neither he nor his mother are smiling.
Photographs from the Victorian era concentrated on very formal portraits of adults and wealthy people who could afford to have their photos taken in the contemporary portrait style. Children weren’t usually included in the photos; possibly because they wouldn’t sit still for the required long periods but also because children in middle- or upper-class society tended to be neither seen nor heard. Examples of children in death in Victorian records are quite common though; families who could not afford portraits could arrange for a photograph to be taken cheaply and quickly after a death. Images could be sent to distant relatives easily and cheaply as the technology of commercial photography sped ahead.
As cameras became smaller and could be taken out of the studio there was a move to document what life was like in the many parts of the world that were being explored and recorded then as commercial sea travel made this possible. Pictures of children in factories and poverty and economic depression were very common at the turn of the century as the rural poor moved in to the cities to seek employment. Images of the children were more likely to be used to demonstrate the poverty of the entire family or community.
A well-known photographer in this style was Lewis Hine; he started working for the National Child Labor Committee in 1906 and photographed children all over America in mills, mines and factories like this example.
These days pictures of children are more likely to show how happy and comfortable and well-fed people are – this example is taken from a contemporary photographer’s website. It is now the case that a child looking ill or poor is more likely to be a model than the real thing.
None of the photos I have of my family are beyond formal poses in studios until I get to the ones that my father took of my sister and me in the early 1960s at home.
These are still in black and white and it isn’t until the late 1960s that colour film was a regular presentation. Photography was a big interest for my father through the 1960s and 1970s as my sister and I grew up so it is no surprise where I get my interest from.
As a happy and loved baby Laura’s possessions and life were full of colour. I wanted to mix the colour and black and white photos together to illustrate the contrast in my life that I felt when Laura died. When I first presented my project to the A2 group I said that I specifically wanted to produce photos of Laura that showed her life in a positive light and that they shouldn’t be just pictures of empty rooms or untouched toys. Presenting those in black and white would have been too maudlin and clichéd so I wanted to use colour as much as I could. An example of this is the picture of the balloons that the children let fly away at Laura’s party; this picture could have been taken at any child’s birthday party on a summer’s day.
The brilliant sunshine and warmth of April 2007 was a defining characteristic of how I will remember the time that Laura died. For the whole of that month the sun shone and it was beautifully warm and sunny like on the day she was cremated and on the day that we had her farewell party. When my father died in March 2001 it was endlessly cold and wet and miserable and this compounded our loss as if to say that we hadn’t yet suffered enough and now we were really going to regret it. Somehow you think it shouldn’t be sunny when someone dies.
Conclusion
When I presented my idea to the other students I showed them a bright and colourful picture of Laura and said that I didn’t want to end up with a project that was all about empty cots and unworn baby clothes. I think I have managed to avoid that. What I discussed a lot with my tutor was how to select the best of the many hundreds of images I had taken and then how to present them; for the final presentation piece I really wanted to present something that used both monochrome and colour.
I was so struck by the Carelha images that I wanted to be able to present something similar. Black and white is traditional for demonstrating truth, accuracy and a documentary style. When you remove the elements of colour, attention is then guided to the subject of the photograph.
I had an idea for presenting the possessions as a tryptych and explored various layouts for this. I also took many different images of the same items being held by different people – myself, Sarah, Emily and my mother. I eventually narrowed this down to three images and these will be the final presentation board.
All of the possessions images are in black and white so I will use some of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park images as a colour presentation to balance the monochrome set. I have got many pictures from Laura’s bench that I have taken through the year and I want to use some of them to show wide-open spaces and people in contrast to the close-ups of the personal possessions.
Endnotes
Last updated 24/01/2026