The images in Carmen Winant’s book “My Birth” suggest that birth is a surpassingly intimate event, animal and violent and mysterious and beautiful—but it is also ordinary and universal.
In her new book, “My Birth,” the artist Carmen Winant, who has two young sons, notes that very few people ask her about her experience of giving birth. “The delivery of another human being: Weren’t they curious about its effect?” she asks. Even other women tend to shy away from the topic. “Voices lower, bodies lean out.” But sometimes she wants to say, “Just ask me.
Installation view of Carmen Winant’s “My Birth, 2018,” in “Being: New Photography 2018,” The Museum of Modern Art.Winant’s book and a photographic installation of the same name that is currently on view as part ofpiece is composed of more than two thousand found images of women in various stages of labor and childbirth, informal artifacts that come from a wide range of books, magazines, and pamphlets. “I scour estate sales, bookstores, garage sales, other people’s cabinets,” Winant told me.
Winant, whose work often uses found imagery to confront feminine experiences , told me that she was influenced by the photographer Larry Sultan, with whom she studied at California College of the Arts. In 1975, Sultan, with Mike Mandel, published “Evidence,” a proto-Pictures Generation masterpiece that collected fifty-nine unrelated photographs from corporate and government archives; later, he mined his parents’ family albums and home movies for a subsequent work, “Pictures From Home.
Winant marvels at how much the birthing process has changed for American women since her parents were born. “Both of my grandmothers, now 98 and 95, were put into twilight sedation at the earliest signs of labor and cannot remember laboring my parents,” she writes; the only people who witnessed the arrival of many baby boomers were the doctors and nurses who attended them.
, the author of “Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe” , is at work on a biography of Richard Avedon.Highlights from the week in culture, every Saturday. Plus: each Wednesday, exclusively for subscribers, the best books of the week.
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