When Cibolo portrait photographer Nancie Jimenez donated a photo session to an elementary school silent auction, she never anticipated the photo session would significantly impact her life.
But that’s exactly what happened when Claire Heins, who was pregnant with her second child at the time, booked a maternity shoot.
Heins, a 33-year-old breast cancer survivor who underwent a double mastectomy, told Jimenez she wanted to do more than just take smiling portraits of the joyous occasion. Instead, she wanted to capture images that would give a voice to an underrepresented group of women.
“It’s a unique thing to get pregnant after breast cancer. It’s not very common, and it’s not very common to get breast cancer at a young age,” Heins told the Rivard Report. “I thought it would be really important to have that represented both for myself and for the community as a whole, that there is hope and it is possible to have children after breast cancer.”