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.” In “My Birth,” she provides a long list of questions that she would be all too willing to answer, among them: Can you describe the quality of pain? Did you fear for your life? Did you have the sense that you were giving birth to yourself? Was the experience sacred? Did you experience orgasm?
Winant’s book and a photographic installation of the same name that is currently on view as part of MOMA’s “Being: New Photography 2018” exhibit make childbirth radically visible. The MOMA piece 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. “It is, in some sense, the real work.” She then spent four days positioning the pictures like pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, each one affixed to the wall with blue painter’s tape, a conscious choice that, for Winant, evokes the labor of working in the studio. The exhibit is located in a corridor that connects gallery spaces—a makeshift “birth canal” in images.
In the book, Winant pairs photos of her own mother’s childbirths with found pictures of other women in similar scenes—women holding still while a nurse presses a stethoscope to their swollen bellies; women writhing in pain, faces pressed against pillows or buried in their partners’ necks; and, finally, women holding their brand new infants to their breasts. Birth, these images suggest, is a surpassingly intimate event, animal and violent and mysterious and beautiful. It is also ordinary, universal.
Winant, whose work often uses found imagery to confront feminine experiences (her piece “Looking Forward to Being Attacked,” which collects images of women in self-defense classes, is currently on view at the Sculpture Center), 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.” In “My Birth,” Winant, like Sultan, fuses family memory and found imagery to document a subject that is, for her, impossible to fully express—“too big for images, too inscrutable for dialogue—so often made to be a lazy and excruciating parody of itself.”
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. (Sylvia Plath, she notes, wrote in “The Bell Jar” that twilight sedation “sounded like just the sort of drug a man would invent.”) Winant was pregnant with her second child while working on “My Birth,” and being steeped in images of deliveries inspired her to ask her husband to document her own—to create a record of the experience, even if she’ll never fully pin it down. “By the time you are reading this, I will have birthed again,” she writes at the end of her book. “I am no closer to understanding who takes possession of this process, or locating the words to make it known.”
