Poem

Your bones are nearing six
years long- shoulders, like bird wings
purged of brown
fat, grey matter
claiming cells

language becomes you
boy, raging against me
neurons firing in the dance
of differentiation, you- splitting
from the mother self

Elias- child of my body, offspring
of loneliness
oxytocin
your stem cells still swimming in my veins

Series One

Project Description

This is photo documentary/multimedia project on New England birth

practice as it relates to cultural values and belief systems. Through
images and text this works seeks to examine the ways in which systems

of beliefs intersect with health care policy, and practice in human
birth. The work explores the spaces in which American /New England
families choose to give birth, including hospitals, birth centers, houses

and apartments.

Seeking to direct viewer attention to the various ways
that the human experience manifests in birth, the work includes images

of actual birth, labor, interactions with health care professionals,
and images of families interacting with newborns in the spaces in

which birth took place.

The documentation of this life event invites discussion about the
intersection of the personal and political nature of the body, birth, and medical practice.

This project functions as both a creative body of images interpreting the complex world
of birth, but also serves a a visual archive of one of the most universal experiences of
twenty-first century New England life. This project connects to a branch of anthropology
called 'visual anthropology' defined as: " ...is both the practice of anthropology through a visual
medium and the study of visual phenomena in culture and society." (Encyclopedia Britannica)