Nowhere To Go

Throughout history, the consolidation of authoritarian power has often gone hand in hand with attempts to control women's bodies.

Nowhere to Go is an anthropology of intimacy, giving birth where the hospital is absent. It reveals women in West Texas who turn childbirth into an act of resistance. In one of the most conservative states in the United States, marked by record maternity ward closures and high maternal mortality, the home is redefined as a space of freedom, outside the system.

There, these protagonists, from varied social and economic backgrounds, give birth accompanied by Silvia Esparza, a midwife and nurse. There is only her. Outside a system where profitability sets the norm and where caesarean sections have become almost routine, they reclaim control over their bodies.

Throughout the series, caves appear as a recurring metaphor, evoking the body as a space of origin and passage, a reminder that reclaiming birth is also a way of reclaiming the thresholds and autonomy of one's own body.

This work seeks to deconstruct the American myth. It questions Tocqueville's notion of a "soft despotism" over bodies in a Trump-era America that has reached the limits of its idea of progress, revealing the dead end of a system.

Mélanie Wenger / 2023–2025 Created with the support for documentary photography from the CNAP.