Winant, Carmen

Carmen Winant created this installation for the 2021 Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibition, Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency. Acknowledging that women’s historical lack of autonomy over their bodies is inextricably linked to sexuality, Winant presents dozens of assembled images featuring individuals experiencing pleasure. The images—many of which were found in alternative publications and journals produced during the 1970s feminist movement—counter false media depictions of the erotic. Their sheer number reflects the impossibility of visually representing such nuanced experiences as pleasure (as well as other underrepresented transformative experiences women share, like childbirth) in a single photograph. Images are integrated with excerpts from two essays: Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” (1978) and Linda Williams’s “Make Love, Not War: Jane Fonda Comes Home (1968–1978)” (2008). Williams’s essay details the revolutionary shift toward a growing understanding of the female body in the 1970s based on solid sexology research over previously ascribed masculinist standards. Lorde’s essay argues that in harnessing the erotic, women can live full and empowered lives, striving toward a greater level of excellence. Collectively, the installation presents the female body as one able to enjoy sex and hold power, conveying the two as interlinked and in opposition to those who seek to politicize and subdue female sexuality.

Carmen Winant was a 2019 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in photography. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Daegu Photo Biennale, Daegu, North Korea; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; and the Wexner Art Center, Columbus, OH; among many others.

Published 6/16/2022