The video collage uses birth videos found on YouTube, to create the centrepiece of this digital triptych. I was present at the birth of a close friend’s daughter. Having had a miscarriage myself earlier in the year, I wanted to be at the birth, and being with her and witnessing the birth, was a catharsis of sorts. The image of the birthing body, and specifically an emerging ‘crowning’ baby, is life affirming and miraculous, yet it also disturbs and has been described as a site where the sublime and the abject meet, the birthing mother, a figure that is, ‘barely contained within its bodily contradictions’ (Ussher, JM) is at once miraculous and disturbing. These birthing body represents the border between the inside and the outside, the ordered and the chaotic. Using video footage shot of my friend in childbirth, I invited people to view a four-minute edit, photographing portraits of them as they watched. Moved to express themselves in various ways, from disgust, and embarrassment, to being moved to tears, the subjects became contemplative, giving them an air of Giotto’s sacred onlookers. The witnessing of a birth is ineffable, the maternal body confronts us ‘ with our personal archaeology’, yet our bodies, ‘must bare no trace of (this) debt to nature’ (Kristeva, J. 1982). Digital cameras and phones, allow people to view themselves in childbirth, or to watch on a screen images of their birth, could photographic images eventually alter the process of birth, and perceptions of self, altogether? A Massive Nothing won the BirthRites collection Prize and is now housed at the University of Kent, for enquiries Birth Rites Collection.