The agonizing pain in Carmen Winant’s “My Birth” photo collection makes it impossible to not take a glance at the countless unframed photographs tapped across the hallways’ walls. As I entered the exhibition, I overheard a woman stating, “This is disgusting, I can’t do this.” She then proceeded to walk away. The woman’s reaction alone shows the success of her photographs. The collection forces you to look at the sugar coated topic of childbirth, unveiling the negative aspects to bringing life into the world. The discomfort in viewing the photographs shows how the audience is being exposed to a new perspective, and this exposure alone is crucial to the shift of society’s perspective on birth. When you look closely, some photographs have women, clearly exhausted from labor, smiling with relief as their baby is born. The strength of these women in the photographs is empowering, yet it is frustrating to see their pain. The raw and uncensored work leaves an unsettling new perspective for the audience to ponder over.
The location of the collection is crucial to the photographer’s concept. The inability to avoid the hallway in the Being: New Photography collection represents the inability to avoid the pain of bringing life into the world. The countless miniature photographs, which coat two 20 foot walls, along with the combination of both black-and-white and color photographs, emphasizes the universality of birth. Instead of sugar-coating childbirth, Winant exhibits how being born is inevitably bittersweet.
The two photographs hung side by side, both shot by Sam Contis, display affection without showing the entire bodies of the subjects. In each photograph, something is cut off or missing. In the photograph to the left, the man behind the girl is hugging her from behind, yet his face is hidden. In the photo to the right, arms are wrapping around a body, but no faces are seen. The composition of the photographs is what originally caught my eye, and what I believe to be the main reason for the photographs’ success. These photographs are both part of Contis’ body of work, “Deep Springs.” She fixates on the freedom and individuality that the American West was originally known for. Her work captures the flexibility of gender and relationships, and the overall ability to explore oneself. Contis’ artistic choice to photograph in black-and-white brings out the story of exploration. Instead of being distracted by colors, the audience is drawn to look at what is going on in each frame.
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