getty abortions | Franzis Kabisch

Volker Pantenburg:

“How much of Jasmin is in Jasmin’s story?”, Franzis Kabisch asks. She is browsing old issues of BRAVO GIRL, a pop magazine targeted at young girls, on the website altezeitschriften.de. In the illustrated article on abortion, Jasmin’s name has been changed, the image of a desperate 15-year-old covering her face in her hands, is the result of a re-enactment with a model.

Kabisch is both the director and the voice-over narrator in this 22-minute-long desktop documentary, which won the prestigious “Golden Dove” award at the 2023 DOK Leipzig Film Festival. getty abortions is a personal investigation into the iconography of abortion and the “emotional scripts” (Erica Millar) that are structuring those images. The form of the desktop documentary allows to confront the public imagery and its inherent ideologies with a personal and empowering feminist counter-narrative.

Images culled from newspapers, magazines, websites, highlight the stereotypes of the dominant public imaginary of abortion. Positive feelings like joy and happiness are reserved for motherhood, while the experience of abortion is inextricably associated with grief, shame, or guilt. This corresponds to the iconography of the women depicted in the media: «Alone and without a face, interchangeable heads without context, without environment, without background». In contrast to this, Kabisch’s own experience in 2014 has left hardly any visual traces – only three documents and one photograph remain. Who decides what is watchable and which images are allowed to represent a deeply personal experience like abortion?

Videographically researching the topic which has been at the core of feminist struggles for decades, Kabisch navigates between google maps where she revisits her own experience, excerpts from literature on abortion (Barbara Duden, Erica Millar), and online searches for the origins of the stock footage. Towards the end, she playfully animates the anonymous women and transforms them into a powerful community.

Kabisch’s film is not only exposing the stigmatizing and disenfranchising use image politics around the termination of pregnancy. In revealing the origins of those photos – getty images and other agencies of stock photographers – she also manages to provide context and symbolically liberate the anonymous models from their objectifying stock photo data bases; with the means of (virtual) glue and scissors, she collages them into a community of individuals express a political demand: «As long as we depend on images to convince others of our right to abortion, I’d rather share a surface with these models and look into the camera for a few seconds before the credits begin».

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getty abortions | Video Essay | Franzis Kabisch | AT-DE 2023 | 22'

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