From Climbing Peaks to Embracing Motherhood: A Studio Maternity Session with Pro Climber Alex Puccio

A length of climbing rope, wound around a woman who has spent her whole career at the other end of one.

Alex Puccio is one of the most decorated boulderers this country has produced, and she is also one of the sweetest people I have had in the studio. Those two facts sit next to each other more often than you would think. The strongest athletes I photograph are almost never the ones performing strength.

Climbing chalk was a unique accessory for Puccio’s maternity shoot.

We went further into fine art than most studio sessions go. The frame that anchors the whole gallery is a fine art nude with her own climbing rope as the only thing she is wearing, coiled the way it would be at the base of a route. It is not a costume. It is the object she has trusted with her life for twenty years, doing one more job.

Around that we shot the rest of it in a boudoir register. Sculpted light, dark frame, nothing hurried. I got to know her and her husband over the course of it, which is the part of this job that does not show up in a gallery.

We had a plan to shoot her climbing later in the pregnancy. She gave birth before we could make it happen. That one still bugs me.

Alex Puccio incorporated her climbing rope into her maternity session.

The studio is where this kind of lighting lives, and if you want the fine art side of it, the boudoir page shows what the lane actually looks like.

More on Alex's climbing career if you do not already know the name.

If you have a thing you have built your life around, bring it. The form on the boudoir page comes straight to me.