A Medieval Maternity Shoot Brings Magic to Motherhood

Photography Tips

The “Stone Soup” fable is one of sneaky cooperation. A group of hungry travellers arrive at a village with an empty pot; the stingy villagers refuse to share their food, so the travellers fill their pot with boiling water, drop in a few stones and tell curious passersby that they’re making a delicious stone soup. It just needs a little something, if they could spare it—one suddenly eager villager tosses in carrots, another offers black pepper, and so on until they’ve got a communal stew going.

According to artistic mind Eva Creel in the video below, this seems to be how fantastical fashion photographer Benjamin Von Wong operates:

“He kind of reminds me of the wanderer who wanders around from village to village making stone soup, which is turning basically nothing into something. He’s able to get communities and strangers to all have a common goal. It’s this superhero talent that he has.”

By donating to the Saving Eliza cause, Creel received a photo shoot from Von Wong—around the same time she became pregnant. They agreed to turn the event into a maternity shoot. One thing led to another, and by the end he was shooting Creel in Middle Ages garb, flocked by owls and wolf-dogs in the picturesque Karstal valley near Trippstadt, Germany.

It’s certainly one of the more unique maternity shoots we’ve seen. The results look like if Parenting magazine did special Game of Thrones edition.

“We thought, you know, a maternity picture is interesting and everything. But what can we do to push it over the top? And we thought, ‘Well, animals.'”