Winant – My Birth

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?