Carmen Winant

In The Last Safe Abortion, artist Carmen Winant considers the labor of women’s health clinics and abortion providers in the United States over the past fifty years.

Drawing upon thousands of historical photographs from archives across the Midwest, as well as photographs made by Winant since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the artist studies what physicians and staff refer to as “the work of the work”: answering phones, holding training sessions, scheduling appointments, and handling logistics.

The photographs themselves are surprisingly ordinary: women answer the phone, sterilize medical equipment, throw staff birthday parties, offer workshops, and schedule appointments.In centering the tender, quotidian, and routine acts that inform this healthcare work, Winant works to counter the ways anti-choice activists have weaponized photography by proposing a visuality that attends to abortion care.