By Carmen Winant
8.75 x 12 in. / 120 pgs
Paperback
Design by Brian Paul Lamotte
Image Text Ithaca / SPBH Editions, 2018
Combining text and image, My Birth, by Columbus, Ohio–based artist Carmen Winant (born 1983), interweaves photographs of the artist’s mother giving birth to her three children with found images of other, anonymous, women undergoing the same experience. As the pictorial narrative progresses, from labor 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. My Birth 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?
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Carmen Winant's Radical Images of Women Giving Birth, Hyperallergic
My Birth, My Body, My Self, PH Museum
"What if birth, long shrouded and parodied by popular culture, was made visible?", British Journal of Photography
Carmen Winant, My Birth, Collector Daily
Interview with Carmen Winant: My Birth, American Suburb X
An Artist’s Vast Collection of Images of Women (and Her Own Mother) Giving Birth, The New Yorker
Artist Carmen Winant on Why 2,000 Images of Childbirth Belong at MoMA, Vogue
