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 labor through delivery, the women’s postures increasingly blend into one another, creating a collective body that strains and releases in unison.

A birth is an amazing and crazy experience. I didn’t know that before I became a mother a few months ago. It is physical, of course. It is also a social experience, a political experience, an existential experience. This is about being a body. This is love at the first sight. This is a strange day with people, strangers and husband. This is absolutely intimate and universal at the same time. I think the book tells all about that, with an elegant design, made as sketches.