JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by SPBH Editions (here). Spiral bound flexicover (30.5 x 22 cm), 172 pages, with 688 color and black-and-white archival photographs. Includes an essay by the artist. Design by Brian Paul Lamotte. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: Carmen Winant uses found imagery to build new visual languages around the female body and artmaking, and her works explore facets of feminism and pose incisive questions about power, body politics, and authorship. In many ways, Winant examines how pictures function, not only as documents, but as tools for social change, and to build and amplify her arguments, she has often used significant image volume, from a range of archival sources.
Winant’s groundbreaking project My Birth, exhibited at the MoMA in 2018 (here) and published in a photobook that same year (reviewed here), used an extensive archive to expose the uncensored experience of giving birth, demanding to reframe it. In Notes on Fundamental Joy (from 2019, reviewed here), she explored and repurposed the imagery made at feminist and lesbian communes in the 1980s, and in Arrangements (from 2022, reviewed here), she dynamically reconfigured the visual relationships of different kinds appropriated archival imagery in sheet form. In each case, the photobook format has given Winant the freedom to construct (and deconstruct) a radical visual narrative through scrupulous arrangements of image and text.
Winant’s most recent project continues her quest to challenge fixed representations of women, focusing on the labor of abortion care and its visual culture. The Last Safe Abortion emphasizes the care, community, and advocacy activities that surround abortion workers, putting the overlooked administrative realities in the center. Most of the images come from institutional archives (or “a storage unit” as they are often described) from across the Midwest, including locations in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Ohio. Winant worked closely with the abortion clinics, sifting through hundreds of boxes of archival material, conducting interviews, and carefully picking out the photographs for the project (in addition to making some of her own photographs). The images were shot between 1973 and 2022, the fifty year period when access to abortion was a constitutional right.
Initially The Last Safe Abortion was conceived as an exhibit for the Minneapolis Institute of Art and is currently on view at the Whitney, part of “Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing at the Whitney” (here). This body of work has also been published as a photobook, allowing the series to reach an even wider audience. It presents abortion as a vital form of care, and clinic staffers as critical, feminist care workers. The book won the Author Book Award at the 2024 Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards.
The title of the book references the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in June of 2022, which signaled a terrifying turn for abortion rights. In terms of design and construction, The Last Safe Abortion resembles a scrapbook-like document. It has a spiral binding, and the cover is just slightly heavier paper than the rest of the book block. The title takes up the entire pinkish cover filling it with four words that appear in a purple all caps font. The photographs are laid out in grids of four per page over bright paper. This design is supposed to evoke the way the same material would be housed in library systems. An essay by the artist is placed on the inside of the back cover, closing the book.
The images feel somewhat amateurish, and this quality stresses the very mundane reality of the clinics – infinite phone calls, medical records, waiting rooms, etc. The photographs are arranged in groups, either thematically or more randomly. The opening page gathers together shots of empty waiting areas of the clinics. As we move through the book, there are photographs of workers at reception desks, answering phone calls, leading sex education classes, talking to women, providing check ups, picking up prescriptions, performing massages, and celebrating holidays. Other pages collect various wall clocks, a reminder that time is essential. The very last page in the book shows two hands holding, and surrounding images depict sky, bringing in a final tone of lightness and hope.
Winant notes that the conversations around abortions, both positive and negative, involve trauma and conflict, and suggests that abortion care is solely healthcare. With this project, she “wanted to capture the work of the work.” Very often abortion care providers are invisible or even vilified. This book brings attention back to the care itself and people who provide it, demanding that we include them in our conversations about reproductive rights.
Winant is one of the leading voices in a new generation of artists who are tirelessly highlighting the importance of female authorship, female representation, and the female gaze, and who are making women’s stories more visible. The Last Safe Abortion is an important contribution to this conversation. Ultimately, it asks us to wrestle with the resonant question of what would the world look like if the photographs of violence and trauma were replaced with models of care and tenderness?
Collector’s POV: Carmen Winant is represented by Patron Gallery in Chicago (here). Her work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
