The Dad Who Photoshops His Baby Daughter Into Dangerous Situations

Social media can lead to many exciting things, but in my stage of life it mostly leads to pictures of children. The lucky kids of my Instagram feed climb mountains, visit world capitals, and play a lot of soccer. They have picnics, first days of school, and lemonade stands. It’s all very idyllic—producing the mix of envy and delight that keeps me coming back for more, even when I don’t want to, not unlike Bilbo and his precious ring.

You can see why, against this backdrop, the photographs of one dad, who I later learned was a Dubliner named Stephen Crowley, caught my attention. The first one that I came across showed a baby girl perched on the top railing of a fence. It was very sweet, a seemingly classic pose—and hardly worth a second glance. But wait—isn’t she a little young to be sitting up high like that? She could fall off at any moment into the water below.

Crowley’s other photos showed equally precarious scenes: the same toddler nonchalantly holding a large kitchen knife, climbing up a narrow ladder to the attic, or standing close to the edge of a seaside pier. The most arresting was this one:

Those slippery stocking feet!—it sets off all the parental alarm bells. Put down your phone! Grab your kid! Now!

I did a bit of Googling and discovered that the images were, as I should have suspected, Photoshopped. In a Reddit post, Crowley explained that he was experimenting with placing his daughter in “marginally dangerous” situations to see what kind of reaction he would provoke. His post received a hundred and fifty-eight thousand upvotes. One viewer commented, “I’m not sure if this makes you the world’s worst parent or the world’s best parent.”

The photographs struck me as a clever response to all the beatific images of children, and the implied idea that there is also a wonderful parent behind the lens. But when I e-mailed Crowley, I learned that the motivation behind his photographs came from an entirely different place. When his daughter was four months old, she had become sick with a rare immune disorder called hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH). “She spent the next six months in the hospital receiving chemotherapy and ultimately a bone marrow transplant, which saved her life,” he wrote to me. Crowley had been sharing photographs of his daughter privately with his family, and soon realized that they were “desperately seeking a little humour in our lives.” That’s when he Photoshopped her onto the fence railing.

After the images went viral, Crowley began hearing from the Internet, and the surprise was how nice everyone was. He received well wishes from all over the world, he told me, “along with people wanting to know more about how they can become donors of blood or bone marrow to help others.” He plans to keep Photoshopping his daughter into sketchy situations: “I’m really looking forward to showing her these when she is older.” And there you have it: a meme with a happy ending.