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A paradox of giving birth is that you are irrefutably there—no one has ever been more there!—and yet not there at all. In all but one of Shannon’s images that portray a woman in the throes of labor, her eyes are shut: She cannot see what is happening because she is what is happening, turning one person into two. In studying these photographs, I suddenly remembered the moment, just after my second child was born, when I stood up too fast and looked down, completely unfazed, to behold myself covered in blood. Great bright globs of gore, falling splat-splat on the linoleum. Blood all over my arms and legs, blood stuck in my hair and crusting on my throat. Whose blood is this? How did this happen? It didn’t seem to matter much, now that the baby was here. But “Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy” made me realize, for the first time in the seven years since that night, that I wouldn’t have minded the chance to review some photographic evidence of how I got that way.
The science journalist Meehan Crist, writing about the birth of her son, describes her “conscious everyday mind . . . floating like pond scum on top of the vast, rich dark where I now laboured, a wordless inner world of sensation and drive to which I had never before had access.” It is perhaps beyond any artist’s abilities to intrude fully upon this world. Instead, the photographer can document the bright, hectic surface while the mother is consumed with her work deep underground. “It felt really good,” Shannon said of Sawson, “to be able to offer a different viewpoint of her experience that she feels like she missed.”
