Extreme Pain, Extreme Joy is both a celebration of birthing bodies and an intimate, candid depiction of what it means to care - Photographer Maggie 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. Produced by Mother Tongue magazine.

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