“Every day, I was reading about the workers on the front lines who are really stepping up and facing the moment with some courage,” Geddes says. Geddes wanted to help others grapple with the emotional toll of their new reality, which is, in her view, a different kind of essential work. Much like the rest of us nonessential workers, Geddes spent the first weeks of March curled into a ball on the sofa, anxiety-scrolling through the headlines, and venturing outside occasionally for walks with her husband, Kel, and their dog, Ethel.ī ut idle hands make fretful minds, and doing nothing at all proved to be just about as stressful as the harried pace of the lives we were leading before all this happened.

“I’m waiting on something from Lichtenstein.”Ī post shared by Anne Geddes a Different Kind of Joy The morning I called to talk to her about the project, she tells me that she’s got 64 countries and counting represented on her grid so far. Collectively, they comprise “The Joy Project,” an initiative Geddes recently began to remind people that there is still good in the world-all over it, in fact. For each day, there was a new post of a baby from a different city featuring their name and age, alongside charmingly specific details. Here was Federico, a funny 14-month-old with a gummy grin, and toddler Mason, smirking from beneath a lime green Shrek mask. On her feed, I found a grainy smattering of fan photography instead, featuring smiling, gurgling, laughing little offspring, sent in from India, Slovakia, Argentina, Australia. I wanted to get lost in Geddes’s carefully crafted fantasia of costumes and childlike wonder, nostalgic for another time and place that wasn’t marked by transient internet imagery and the coronavirus. Comatose from incessant TV-watching, I longed to rest my eyes upon something electric, something to shake me awake or at least keep me afloat. (Reader, things were getting bleak).

Today, the internet churns out imagery at a pace with which few photographers can compete, while email gobbled up the greeting-card industry, leaving Geddes in dire straits.īut you wouldn’t know any of this by looking at her life from the outside, as I did one evening a few weeks ago, when I unwittingly fell down the rabbit hole of her Instagram. In truth, the industry that propelled Geddes to superstardom in the 1990s has all but evaporated. As is often the case, I was in for a rude awakening. Like many famous artists, Anne Geddes both is and isn’t what you think she is, but I never could have imagined that an interview with the self-described queen of “joy spreading” would result in anything less than a walk down the yellow brick road of her memory lane, relegated mostly to talk of babies superimposed onto the heads of sunflowers.

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