Carmen Winant on The Last Safe Abortion and the Way forward for Feminist Photography

FRIDAY 4:13 PM NOVEMBER 14, 2025 PARIS

In 2018, when Carmen Winant confirmed as much as the MoMA with a shoebox of two,000 cut-out images, she’d infrequently exhibited her work publicly. There had been archival pictures of infants breaching, rivulets of vaginal fluid, taut bellies and breasts. For the museum’s exhibition of rising photographers, her plan was to coat the partitions along with her images utilizing blue artists tape. But then she panicked. “I tried to get out of it. I said, Oh, let’s frame them.” Her curator was agency, and the blue tape would keep. And so started her breakout present, My Birth.

Since 2018, Winant’s turn out to be one thing of a celebrity. Her type, blanketing partitions in archival pictures, works in service of her gestalt: to reclaim and reframe pictures of ladies, particularly these lengthy erased and ignored. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, she confirmed The Last Safe Abortion, a photograph set up of two,500 prints of abortion care, that includes sterile rooms, friendly-looking receptionists answering telephones, and some flashes of Winant in mirrors. No coat-hangers or child corpses, simply the on a regular basis duties central to abortion care. “It’s not about me and yet it is,” Winant instructed me on the steps of the Palais Royal final week, the place she was giving a lecture, “What Is a Feminist Picture?,” on the annual Paris Photo exhibition. After, she joined me outdoors to elucidate why her work is “fucking funky.”

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ELOISE KING-CLEMENTS: So the lecture you simply gave known as “What is a Feminist Picture?” Did you give you that title?

CARMEN WINANT: I form of recycled that title. That is definitely the title of a category I as soon as created and delivered the place we had been pondering far more about that query at face worth, serious about literal methods and in composition, in gentle, in association, which can be feminist. I imply, I’ve not invented these. I need to make it clear.

KING-CLEMENTS: Yeah. 

WINANT: I’m feeling round traditionally, largely within the twentieth century, for the way ladies and feminist photographers have approached this query. So as an example, there’s a really well-known photographer named Jeb. It’s truly an acronym for Joan E. Biren.

KING-CLEMENTS: Okay.

WINANT: She’s nonetheless alive and may be very vibrant and making photos, however was very energetic in homosexual liberation, some lesbian separatism. She thought loads about how many individuals must be in {a photograph} and the way accustomed we’re to there being a sole hero determine, not simply in pictures, however in artwork historical past, and the way she labored to upend that by usually taking images of teams of ladies. They would commerce the digicam backwards and forwards, taking activates the identical mode of movie or double-exposing one image on high of one other. So that’s the place I borrowed the title from. And I like that it was a query, an inquiry.

KING-CLEMENTS: Online it was billed as a “performative lecture.” So I used to be like, “This could just be a talk, or this could be really out there.”

WINANT: I don’t know if it fairly lived as much as its title. I joke—and it’s not a really humorous joke—that PowerPoint is my second medium.

KING-CLEMENTS: Not Google Slides?

WINANT: I like all of them. I don’t discriminate. Sometimes I make them and I don’t ever present them. Then I began to assume, “Well, maybe these things that I’m making as research for myself are interesting and viable to present in relation to the work—not as an explanation of it, but as a compliment.”

KING-CLEMENTS: It jogs my memory of your work, which you talked about as being “funky,” the way in which you current it.

WINANT: I really feel like I’m nonetheless unlearning the inculcated sexism of the world and of artwork faculty. It’s actually simply the intense photographers, which is code for the white male photographers. When I used to be a youngster, as with plenty of youngsters, I plastered my partitions with pictures. It was obsessive to a degree that was possibly a bit of bit unhealthy. I’d put pictures on high of pictures of pictures of pictures.

KING-CLEMENTS: What had been the pictures?

WINANT: Oh my god, they had been so corny. It was simply what I had entry to. I’d gather Absolut vodka advertisements. There’d be Got Milk? advertisements. Then I went to artwork faculty and I realized the way to be a “photographer,” in quotes, and provides myself permission to begin making artwork the way in which that I did once I was a youngster. So to your query concerning the funkiness of it, yeah, it’s fucking funky. And that was coded for me in methods I couldn’t have even named on the time as being ladies’s paintings and youngsters’s paintings.

KING-CLEMENTS: Did you ever have a person in a swimsuit be like, “This isn’t art”?

WINANT: No. If something, I’ve been so affirmed. I’m positive individuals really feel that method about my work, however I’ve been so affirmed by feminist curators that I’ve labored with who’ve lifted me up. The instance I used to be going to present once you had been asking about funkiness was at MoMA in 2018. I labored with a curator named Lucy Gallun, she introduced me in having barely proven my work at that time and gave me this chance. But then I felt nervous about following by way of with the plan, which was taping start pictures to the wall with blue tape, painter’s tape, and I attempted to get out of it. I mentioned, “Oh, let’s frame them.” But she wouldn’t let me. 

KING-CLEMENTS: Wow.

WINANT: She gently talked me out of it. So I really feel like if something, I’ve had the inverse expertise. There’s lovely, refined, huge images all over the place, and never solely am I taping up my shitty, cut-out little pictures, however they’re [images] of vulvas and vaginas spilling fluid. I’m not feigning modesty once I say that that was a scary and very susceptible expertise for me to comply with by way of on.

KING-CLEMENTS: I do really feel like 2018 was a little bit of a unique time. There was much less nudity.

WINANT: It was positively a unique time. I can say, no less than within the context of the artwork world, that angle shifts have taken place between 2018 and 2025, largely round motherhood. All of a sudden, motherhood feels stylish. It’s a topic worthy of inventive and mental inquiry.

KING-CLEMENTS: That’s nice.

WINANT: But I get a bit of bit nervous as a result of I’m like, “Something’s trendy.” That means at a sure level, it’s going to be unstylish. I’m so used to swinging over to a extra paranoid place, so I’m attempting to carry on to a extra optimistic one round this.

KING-CLEMENTS: Yeah. So you set it [your images] together with your blue tape, after which what? Do you go to the exhibition? Is there a gap the place you’re having drinks? How do you react as soon as it’s put in?

WINANT: When I’m putting in it with the assistance of others, I’m this near it, what I imply? It’s like, an inch away from my face, actually and metaphysically, so it’s onerous to see. If something, I really feel like I would like distance from it. Of course, I look again on older work and I feel, “Oh, I would make that differently” or “I don’t like that as much anymore” or “I made these mistakes.” But they’re long-term initiatives, so it feels very satisfying to get them on the planet to be interacted with.

KING-CLEMENTS: And there’s a mission behind that. You’re not placing plenty of ego into this.

WINANT: That’s my hope. I imply, I’m consistently attempting to dissolve my ego, however I don’t know the way that mission goes.

KING-CLEMENTS: I don’t see any ego.

WINANT: Making artwork that’s about service helps me to diffuse or circumnavigate the egomania of the artwork world. 

KING-CLEMENTS: Are you taking plenty of images now? Because I did some analysis and noticed that you simply had stopped taking images. You had been largely working with archival work, and then you definately began The Last Safe Abortion.

WINANT: Yeah.

KING-CLEMENTS: What was that like?

WINANT: For years I didn’t make my very own photos and I actually thought I by no means would once more. There’s lifetimes of labor within the archive, in essentially the most capacious sense of that phrase. But then I labored on the mission My Birth and The Last Safe Abortion. I made images within the clinics, of the clinic staff, and I additionally included images of myself within the mirror, like once I would go by a reflective floor or if I used to be attempting to complete off a roll. I’m simply so hesitant to make myself the protagonist. It’s not about me and but it’s. Quite actually, I had an abortion between the births of my youngsters. It was terrifying for all these causes, however I included a lot of images that I took of myself for that purpose, to essentially carry the mission as much as the current second. Otherwise, it may be learn as one thing simply ossified in time.

KING-CLEMENTS: That’s a very nice level. I struggled generally with loving pictures, then additionally feeling actually offended at pictures. As a feminist, I really feel like pictures traditionally is a medium of the male gaze. To what extent do you like and to what extent does it make you offended?

WINANT: Photography is so damaging. For higher or worse, I can by no means get away from it. And that feeling solely intensifies over time. I feel I really feel much less offended about it. I really feel the potential of it in new methods. Just to present you one instance, I used to be engaged on the abortion mission. I traveled to a lot of clinics, and I used to be in Wichita, Kansas, which is the positioning of a really notorious assassination of an abortion physician named George Tiller within the early 2000s who was shot popping out of church. He was one of many few medical doctors who carried out medically obligatory late-term abortions within the nation. They walked me across the clinic and so they had this dusty $10 picture album and began flipping by way of it with me. It had essentially the most traditionally essential images of Dr. Tiller—the times and hours earlier than he was assassinated, the rituals that they carried out of their clinic collectively after he was killed. Those are very shifting experiences for me that reinvent what pictures could be, but in addition facilitate and precipitate relational experiences. I don’t see that working with out the {photograph} between us.