Wealth of Nations is the first iteration of a sculptural book that re-envisions Adam Smith’s canonical text by the same name, which examines the "commercial society." Smith’s work has transformed in meaning throughout two and a half centuries of use and misuse. What was once an idea posited by a complex savant has become a symbol in American culture, regarded as a foundational text in economics and political science, and mobilized in favor of markets and the commodification of life. Utilizing appropriated imagery, I aim to challenge its symbolic meaning by inserting critical representations of those who live marginalized within the framework of this system. This is part of an ongoing project in which I use archival and appropriated imagery to forefront essential laborers—with an emphasis on childbirth, nursing, and caregiving—upon whose work society depends. However, society fails to acknowledge such labor as a contribution because it is unpaid, low wage, or deemed unworthy due to the identity of the individual or group.

I begin this process with Lennart Nilsson, a Swedish photographer, who is celebrated for his medical imagery of fetuses. One of his most widely known books, A Child is Born, was published in 1965 and has since gone through many editions. Nilsson's photographic work has deeply affected the way we imagine the human body and fetal development. The feminist theorist, E. Ann Kaplan, examines the meaning of his work, which was also published in Life magazine. In her essay “Look Who’s Talking, Indeed: Fetal Images in Recent North American Visual Culture,” Kaplan states: “Through incredible magnification, the brightly colored images of swirls and folds, and the planet like fertilized egg, are made to look like images of outer-space-conception on the grand scale. The images present the fetus-as-miracle, as the wonder of Man (sic), far beyond the mundane scale of a simple, ordinary, female body” (126). While Kaplan challenged Nilsson’s fetal imagery, I aim to engage with his photographs of women in labor—the images that did not appear in Life magazine because they would have been considered vulgar, unappealing, unimportant to notions of discovery or as Kaplan puts it, “a simple, ordinary, female body.” By appropriating Nilsson’s work and altering its enunciation of childbirth and scientific discovery, I plan to challenge notions of ownership: in our image-saturated world, if you have ownership over photographs of women laboring, do you also own their labor by controlling and profiting from the image?