My Birth – Carmen Winant

My Birth is a project by artist Carmen Winant, who in this book mixes archive photographs of her mother’s birth with other women’s ones.
As the narrative flow advances, from labor to the very act of giving birth, the women’s positions increasingly merge with each other, creating a collective body that stretches and releases in unison.
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The volume, which recounts this special moment without any kind of censorship, confronts the viewer with a whole series of questions, some of which the artist herself explores in the text accompanying the book: What if the birth, which has long remained a private and intimate event, were made visible? What if it was possible to find a comforting and dynamic language to describe this moment? What if, by continuing to insist on describing a process so many times and emphasizing its subjectivity, we understood that childbirth, and its representation, ends up becoming a political act?
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My Birth, coincides with Winant’s on-site installation at Moma for the exhibition “Being: New Photography 2018”.
The complementary projects were conceived together, directly following the birth of the artist’s first child and while she was pregnant with her second.