For The Last Safe Abortion, Carmen Winant assembled 2,500 photographic prints to form a collective portrait of the ordinary, daily tasks required to provide abortion health care. Drawn from the archives of university special collections and clinics (and supplemented by photographs made by the artist), these images depict staff, physicians, and volunteers taken over a fifty-year period before the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
In this event, Winant extends this project by bringing together a group of clinicians, patients, and activists from the MYAbortion Network to discuss how photography is central to understanding the medical, political, and social realities of abortion care.
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Thursday 13 June
18:30 EDT
Floor 3, Theatre
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St
New York, NY 10014
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About The Last Safe Abortion
Focusing on the near-fifty-year period in which abortion was legal in the United States (1973–2022), The Last Safe Abortion recognises the care, advocacy, and community-building of abortion workers. Artist Carmen Winant draws from over a dozen personal, organisational, and institutional archives from across the Midwest, in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Ohio. The photographs themselves are surprisingly regular: women answer the phone, sterilize medical equipment, throw staff birthday parties, offer workshops, and schedule appointments. In centring the tender, quotidian, and routine acts that inform this healthcare work, Winant works to counter the ways anti-choice activists have weaponised photography by proposing a visuality that attends to abortion care. The Last Safe Abortion presents a selection of this vast collection of photographs, accompanied by a text by Winant.
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