My Birth
Carmen Winant
MACK and Self Publish, Be Happy
English
Softcover (with poster jacket)
120 pages
220 x 205 mm
2024
ISBN 9781999814441
A book of text and image, My Birth interweaves photographs of the artist Carmen Winant’s mother giving birth to her three children with found images of other, anonymous women undergoing the same bodily experience. As the pictorial narrative progresses, from labour through delivery, the women’s postures increasingly blend into one another, creating a collective body that strains and releases in unison.
In addition to the photographic sequence, My Birth includes an original text by the artist exploring the shared, yet solitary, ownership of the experience of birth. A facsimile of Winant’s own journal, this book asks: What if birth, long shrouded and parodied by popular culture, was made visible? What if a comfortable and dynamic language existed to describe it? What if, in picturing the process so many times over and insisting on its very subjectivity, we understood childbirth, and its representation, to be a political act?
The first edition of this publication coincided with Winant’s on-site installation at the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Being: New Photography 2018’, with both projects conceived of together directly following the birth of the artist’s first child and while she was pregnant with her second.
(source: https://mackbooks.eu/products/my-birth-br-carmen-winant-br-spbh-editions)
About the Artist
Carmen Winant (born 1983) is an artist and writer based in Columbus, OH, where she is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University. Winant’s recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the SculptureCenter, New York; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; and the CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto. Winant’s recent artist books, My Birth and Notes on Fundamental Joy, were published by SPBH Editions, ITI Press, and Printed Matter, Inc. Winant’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo. Winant was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 2019 and a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage grant in 2020. She currently holds an FCA Artist Grant and is the winner of the Images Vevey Book Award 2021/2022. Winant is the mother of two sons, Carlo and Rafa, who she shares with her partner, Luke Stettner.
carmenwinant.com
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About the Publishers
Self Publish, Be Happy was founded by Bruno Ceschel in 2010 to promote a new generation of photographers and self-publishers. Through its activities in publishing, the curation of exhibitions and events, and education it has helped to support photography culture around the world. In late 2023, Self Publish, Be Happy Editions became an imprint of MACK Books. selfpublishbehappy.com
(source: http://selfpublishbehappy.com/information/)
MACK Books are an art and photography publishing house based in London, working with established and emerging artists, writers and curators, and cultural institutions.
mackbooks.co.uk
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/pages/about-us)
