A patient with her newborn baby at the Juan Pablo Pina public hospital in San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic.
For her series ‘Birth Culture’, Brooklyn-based photographer Alice Proujansky traveled the world capturing women giving birth.
Proujansky was inspired by a photograph she took of a live birth she witnessed while volunteering in a hospital in the Dominican Republic in 2006.
“It’s so interesting to me. It’s so exciting to be part of a transformational process, it has a rhythm to it in that there’s a probable series of events... but every time it’s different,” she said in an article in Slate.
Her fascination with the various ways different cultures approach birth took her across the United States, as well as countries like Nigeria and Mexico.
Proujansky states that there are still taboos surrounding birth in America, saying that it represents ideas of “struggle, power, transformation and mortality” that deviate from pre-existing notions of what women’s bodies look like.
The birth process today is also shrouded in mystery, with most women only learning about it when their friends get pregnant.
“I started this project when I was younger and my friend was pregnant because I thought ‘I don’t really understand what birth is, what’s this thing that’s likely to be a big part of my life?’ I also wanted to photograph a transformative part of being human that wasn’t death.”
Ultimately, she hopes her images will become part of a larger conversation on how to improve the birth process, pointing out that there were 287,000 materal deaths worldwide in 2010, and that the United States has the highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized nation.
‘Birth Culture’ will be exhibiting at United Photo Industries in Brooklyn from 6 to 28 November 2014.
Traditional Mayan midwife Elsa Gonzalez Ayala shows CASA Midwifery School students how to perform a traditional Mayan massage used to shrink a woman’s uterus and reduce post-partum bleeding.
Laura Mejia, 38, labors at the Birth Place, assisted by her husband Brandon Smith, and doula, Stephanie Abdullah-Simmons. All patients at this birth center in Winter Garden, Florida, deliver with midwives unless a complication arises, in which case they are transferred to a hospital.
A nurse inserts Megan Tudryn’s IV in preparation for an epidural at the Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The staff encourages women to make their own decisions about pain management during labor. With few exceptions, midwifery forms the basis of the hospital’s obstetric care.
Midwife Dorothy Igoro Chinyere examines a patient immediately following delivery at the Doctors Without Borders-run Aiyetoro Health Centre in Lagos, Nigeria.
Jen Carnig holds her son Wiley James Carnig Lavoie immediately after his birth at home as her husband, Dan Lavoie, daughter, Olive Carnig-Lavoie, and best friend, Lisa Johnson, look on.
[via Slate, images by Alice Proujansky]