A photographer documents an unexpected pregnancy, and the life that came after
Photographs and words by Matt Eich
When I met my wife, we were both in college. She was eighteen and I was nineteen, and we didn’t have any plans of starting a family. I actually joked with her early on and said, “Hey, if you get pregnant, be aware that I’m going to photograph the whole thing.” It was something we kind of laughed about then. But it became a reality.
It was like I stumbled into an ambush and happened to be armed with a camera. I met Melissa in the stairwell and she wordlessly led me up to her room and showed me this pregnancy strip, and it wasn’t any ambiguous line or color, or anything like that. It just said “PREGNANT.” I think the first thing I did was laugh out loud, actually, and then we both kind of just collapsed. We sat down on the floor, and the reality was sinking in, and she made that face, and I made a photograph.
