The Body I Couldn’t Abstract

When Megan O’Grady became a mother, her relationship to art changed. Which was a big deal, because she’s a professor—you guessed it—art. O’Grady began to react in news ways to images of the female body. Take, for instance, artist Heji Shin’s photos of infants crowning:

They seemed to Shin like something from The Exorcist, she told me when I reached out and asked about her initial reaction to the results of the shoot. (She had worked with a midwife to obtain permission from the mothers, who received a set of conventional photographs of the delivery in exchange for allowing Shin in the room.) Her retoucher had started to cry on first sight of the images. But as the horror-movie thrill of them wore off, the Baby photos took on other meanings. Men often reacted more positively to the images, Shin said, finding in them an analogy for art-making. Once babies entered the realm of metaphor, they were deemed acceptable as art.

Talking to Shin—who is not a parent—I realized that looking at the Baby series was probably the first time I had seen new motherhood depicted unsentimentally. To have a child is to take a risk, to make art is to risk, and here, embodied in Shin’s bloody babies, was all the fragility of the human animal and its ferocity of will. The photographer seemed relieved when I told her they were the closest thing I’d ever seen to my own experience. I didn’t find the Baby series transgressive, nor did I see the images in metaphorical terms. They were true, and they were a relief.