Carmen Winant, My Birth
Carmen Winant, My Birth
Online Only
My Birth, a powerful book by artist Carmen Winant, combines text and image to explore the universal yet deeply personal experience of childbirth. The book interweaves photographs of Winant’s mother giving birth to her three children with found images of anonymous women experiencing the same transformative process. As the visual sequence progresses from labor to delivery, the postures and expressions of the women begin to blend, forming a collective narrative of shared bodily experience.
Accompanying the photographs, My Birth includes a facsimile of Winant’s journal, with original text that questions how childbirth is represented. Winant invites readers to consider: What if birth, often obscured or parodied in popular culture, were made visible? What if a dynamic language existed to describe it? By picturing this process repeatedly and emphasizing its subjectivity, Winant reframes childbirth—and its portrayal—as a political act.