PDN Photo of the Day

Motherhood, Sex and Reproductive Health

Unveiled – an exhibition of three photographic projects that reveal overlooked aspects of women’s sexuality, motherhood, and reproductive health – is on view at The Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC) through June 29.

Megan Jacobs’s project “Hidden Mothers” references Victorian-era portraiture in which mothers hide under fabric while holding their child. Jacobs’s images offer a contemporary metaphor for the unrecognized work of motherhood. “Mothers are navigating a world where their roles as nurturer can feel sidelined and invisible,” she writes in her artist statement.

In her series Parturition, Lindsey Beal documents vintage gynecological tools dating back to the 1700s, uncovering a complicated history of medicine fraught with sexism and racism. Beal writes, “Tools were often forcibly tested on the poor, the enslaved, and sex workers.” Conversely, those tools saved lives.

And in Wired, Sarah Sudhoff photographs sex research devices used at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction —challenging us to separate emotionless scientific inquiry from notions of sexual taboos. “We can’t help but imagine the stories the devices carry with them: What was done with them? To whom? And by whom? And because these devices are intended to elicit and record sexual responses, they can never be fully separated from their ‘naughty’ or ‘pornographic’ meanings, no matter to what extent the Institute uses them as tools of science,” states Sudhoff.

Unveiled
Megan Jacobs, Lindsey Beal and Sarah Sudhoff
The Colorado Photographic Arts Center
Through June 29, 2019

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