A Second Beating Heart

A Second Beating Heart

The birth of a child is also the birth of a mother. Her body carries a second beating heart. When that second heart suddenly beats outside the body, everything changes.

The photographic long-term project »A Second Beating Heart« tells the story of a woman as a newborn mother, using documentary and auto-fictional strategies. A few days after giving birth to her first child, the woman no longer leaves the house. What begins insidiously becomes a new reality. For almost three years the house becomes a shelter, a prison and a cocoon at the same time. What many people experienced during the pandemic years as a compulsion or an ex­ternal necessity, the isolation at home, becomes a vital strategy for the new mother: Inner spaces become outer spaces and vice versa. - A photo art book about the many sides of motherhood, about love and postpartum depression, a topic that is too often kept silent.

The series is published as an art book with SHIFT BOOKS 2021.

Shortlisted for Belfast Photofestival 2021

Stiftung Buchkunst 2021

Vonovia Award für Fotografie 2022 Shortlist

Languages: German, Englisch
42 Analog Color Photographs
With an Essay by Rabea Edel (Germ./Engl.)

Design: Christine Lange , Edit: Gillian Henn

ISBN 978-3-948174-13-2

»A Second Beating Heart« was created over a period of three years. Rabea Edel staged the individual scenes of the story, which she came across in her own family by chance. She was five months pregnant when taking the first pictures, using analog medium format photography. The terms Postpartum Depression (PPD) or Postpartum Anxiety (PPA) were not as established in the 1970s, when the story behind the project took place, as they are nowadays. Rather, one spoke of an Episode, Baby Blues or Moods. Shame, ignorance of the frequency of this disease and a severe lack of information and preventive measures before birth have contributed to stigmatization and continue to do so today. This made it all the more urgent for her to work on the topic. Postpartum depression, like the experience of motherhood, is a topic that is avoided as an intellectual, aesthetic, and psychological perspective in the arts and social discourses. A good 15 % of mothers develop PPD or postpartum anxiety disorders, and 4 % of fathers are also affected; the number of unreported cases is probably higher. Through the re-staging and the combination of documentary and auto-fictional means, the photographer and her child became protagonists of the story, which became her own story and which is, in variants, the story of many mothers out there. Through the confrontation with the inherited trauma as well as with her own experiences, she wants to set images against the silence.