A book of text and image, My Birth interweaves photographs of the artist Carmen Winant’s mother giving birth to her three children with found images of other, anonymous women undergoing the same bodily experience. As the pictorial narrative progresses, from labour through delivery, the women’s postures increasingly blend into one another, creating a collective body that strains and releases in unison.
In addition to the photographic sequence, My Birth includes an original text by the artist exploring the shared, yet solitary, ownership of the experience of birth. A facsimile of Winant’s own journal, this book asks: What if birth, long shrouded and parodied by popular culture, was made visible? What if a comfortable and dynamic language existed to describe it? What if, in picturing the process so many times over and insisting on its very subjectivity, we understood childbirth, and its representation, to be a political act?
The first edition of this publication coincided with Winant’s on-site installation at the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Being: New Photography 2018’, with both projects conceived of together directly following the birth of the artist’s first child and while she was pregnant with her second.
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