Pregnant Pictures

This book establishes pregnant pictures as a genre and pregnancy itself as a shape and an experience worthy of aesthetic attention. As elastic as the pregnant bodies they portray, these photos encompass and express the multiple dimensions of pregnancy and the many subtleties of the pregnant woman, from the archetypal to the idiosyncratic. A stunning collection and a fascinating analysis! -- Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage ... presents a revolutionary body of images and analyses. What an astonishing archive Matthews and Wexler have assembled! Scholars and artists will be making reference to this book for years to come. -- Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon In tracing pictures of pregnancy in modernist art photography, childbirth books, medical texts, advertising images and family photographs, Wexler and Matthews reveal the shifting social attitudes about pregnancy in the twentieth century. Inventing a vocabulary to discuss forms of representation that have remained as invisible in popular as in academic discourse, they have offered us a stunning collection of images, and a wonderful introduction to a new feminist photographic theory and practice. -- Marianne G. Hirsch, author of Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory ...skillfully unravels the hidden politics behind the imagery. -- Village Voice Literary Supplement