Carmen Winant’s photo album-style homage to the unsung labour of abortion clinic staff is at once beautiful and sobering
Artist Carmen Winant has a history of working with found images to challenge the representation of women. In My Birth (2018), an exhibition and photobook, she collated hundreds of such images of women giving birth alongside photographs of her own delivery. Here she turns to birth’s antithesis, albeit while operating in a less direct manner: rather than focusing on the individual experience, Winant has drawn from a dozen photo archives documenting reproductive health clinics and planned parenthood in the American Midwest (Winant is from Ohio) to emphasise the care and community that made abortion possible and safe (all the images date from between 1973 and 2022, the 50 years during which abortion rights were guaranteed in the US). Updating these are photographs the artist took during pilgrimages to the clinics pictured in the archives.
With its chunky spiral binding, the book has the feel of a photo album in which the black-and-white and coloured photographs appear to have been pasted on brightly coloured pages (here represented in the form of scans). The images (including Winant’s) have a vintage glow and an amateurish quality, emphasising the mundane reality of the clinics. Some of the groupings (each page features four images, some arranged thematically, others more randomly) document the buildings, the empty waiting and examination rooms; others zoom in on surgical tools, contraceptive devices, information stands or leaflets, and banners advocating women’s rights; other pages gather wonky shots of wall clocks – ominous reminders of time running out.
In between, we see the all-female staff performing the often unsung, routine tasks that surround abortion: answering the phone, welcoming patients, sterilising medical equipment, running workshops on contraception or campaigning for reproductive rights. Photographs of colleagues posing together, smiling, further anchor the sense of joy, warmth and resilience that emanates from such community-building labour. Looming like a shadow however is the sobering reality hinted at in the book’s title: access to abortion is now banned or restricted in 21 states, forcing many women to undergo this experience alone, unsafely or not at all. On the last page, three shots of sunny skies surround a closeup of two hands holding one another – an ode, perhaps, to the resilience of such networks, some of which now operate clandestinely.
The Last Safe Abortion by Carmen Winant. SPBH Editions, £45 (softcover)
