Photographer Glenna Gordon has traveled the world, documenting everything from Nigerian weddings and abandoned oil tankers on the African coast to white supremacist groups and the rise of Donald Trump.
Her work in the United States has focused on the uneasy intersection between personal freedom and government oversight, including access to abortions. Traveling to clinics with a camera, Gordon realized that the graphic images that anti-abortion protesters often display were wildly misleading, and that she didn’t actually know where to go to see accurate photographs of abortions. She set out to make such images herself.
“One of the hardest thing about photographing abortion is that it’s not high drama,” she told BuzzFeed News. “Someone goes to a doctor’s appointment, and then they come back.”
Her work documenting abortions led her across the US, sometimes following the doctors and patients who travel outside their home states to provide or seek abortion care.
“With all of these pictures, my goal as a photographer was always to show you something that you didn’t know,” she added. “Most people don’t know what a fetus looks like. Abortion takes place behind closed doors — for medical privacy and for safety — but I also believe something is gained by creating visuals for this process.”
Since Gordon began her photo series, some states have passed even more restrictive laws. Texas outlawed abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, usually around the sixth week of a pregnancy, and an Oklahoma law will make performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison starting this summer. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks, a decision that will have national implications and could overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that made abortion legal nationwide in 1973.
We spoke with Gordon in April about how her photography evolved from covering white supremacy to reproductive rights, and the misinformation she’s aiming to confront with her work.
