Against the backdrop of an America that increasingly casts women’s healthcare and bodily autonomy aside, Maggie Shannon’s Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy is both a celebration of birthing bodies and an intimate, candid depiction of what it means to care—Shannon demystifies childbirth, reminding us that it is at once epic, and utterly ordinary. 

Shannon’s award-winning photo series began as a documentation of midwife-led home births after much of the US went into lockdown in early March 2020; now it is recontextualized in book form, complete with a foreword by Angela Garbes, an artist Q&A with critic Gem Fletcher and a slew of never-before-seen images that together create a timeless meditation on this fundamental human experience. 

Dimensions: 8.5” x 10.5”

Soft fabric cover, thread-sewn and Swiss-bound, 112 pages