Visual activism that centers the critical analysis and documentary practice of birth photography.
Working at the intersection of visual culture, reproductive justice, and community-based storytelling, her practice examines how birth has historically been represented, medicalized, obscured, and politicized within the United States. Through both critical inquiry and active photographic documentation, she explores the role images play in shaping public understanding of care, agency, memory, and the legibility of motherhood.
Her ongoing work is grounded in long-term photographic engagement alongside midwives at Kindred Space LA, where she documents birthing and postpartum experiences through a relational and humanistic approach rooted in trust, consent, and active listening.
Her work serves two interconnected purposes:
To document and make visible the experiences of birthing people and communities historically marginalized by the systemic racism embedded within U.S. healthcare and obstetric systems
To expand access to birth documentation for birthing people of color, whose experiences have often been excluded from both visual archives and commercial birth photography
Avoiding extractive photographic practices, Silverstein views image-making as a collaborative act of memory-capture. Her work asks what it means to create archives that belong to the communities within them, and how photography can function as both cultural memory and a tool for resistance.
Her writing and research on birth photography and visual culture will be published in a 2026 visual studies anthology that will serve as part of the curriculum for the Museum Studies Certificate Program at East Los Angeles College.
This work exists as both artistic practice and public intervention, rooted in the belief that visibility, authorship, and representation matter materially in the lives of birthing people of color and their communities.