We photograph and interview childfree people, so they know they're not alone.
It started with a taxi driver in Berlin who spent thirty minutes trying to talk me out of my own life. I was furious. So I picked up my camera.
OUR STORY
It started in a Berlin taxi in 2016.
I’d just landed when the driver asked the usual questions. Married? Children? When I told him I didn’t have children and didn’t want them, he nearly ran the car off the road. For the next thirty minutes he tried to talk me out of my own life. “Just have one. By the second, you’ll like it.” I was furious. So I did what I always do. I picked up my camera.
I put a call-out on my personal blog asking if any women who didn’t want children would let me photograph them and tell me their story. Forty people responded. I remember thinking: people like me exist.
That moment changed my life.
Then We are Childfree was featured in The New York Times and messages started flooding in from all over the world. People who’d felt alone for years, finally felt seen. We knew we couldn’t stop.
Since then we’ve photographed, interviewed and published hundreds of stories from people all over the world, through portraits, podcasts and written submissions. Our work has been covered by The Guardian, Vogue and BBC Radio 2, and we run workshops with organisations trying to build workplaces that don’t treat childfree people as an afterthought.
Right now James and I are travelling full-time in our camper van Dolly, to meet the women and men whose stories need telling. James writes and edits, I photograph and interview. No team, no funding, no investors. Just the two of us and a community that keeps us going.
This year we’re focused on the stories of childfree elders. The people in their sixties, seventies and beyond, who made this choice before it even had a name. We want to bring hope to our community and prove to the world that a happy, fulfilling childfree life is absolutely possible.
Whether you’re childfree by choice, circumstance, or still figuring it out, you’re in the right place.
Zoƫ and James x
OUR HIGHLIGHTS
Featured in The New York Times
EY invited us to lead a childfree workshop
Featured in The Guardian
Interviewed on BBC Radio 2
Front page of Germany's Der Tagesspiegel
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