Spirals investigates the forced contraception and sterilisation campaign imposed on Greenlandic women under Danish authority between 1966 and 1975. French photographer Juliette Pavy approaches the subject through investigative reporting, documentary photography and artistic exploration. Her concern is with the women affected and with the long silence surrounding what happened to their bodies. The project brings an institutional history into contact with the lives of those who experienced it.
That combination of methods gives the book its particular scope. Investigation establishes the historical subject, while photography offers a means of attending to people and experience beyond an administrative account. The dedication addresses those whose bodies have been dispossessed, controlled and exploited, explicitly placing bodily autonomy at the centre of the work. Read in that light, the title’s spiral suggests a useful question for the viewer: how do the consequences of a past intervention continue to return in the present?
Four Eyes éditions released the 128-page hardcover in October 2025, with English and French texts. Pavy also makes a Greenlandic translation available separately, crediting Theo Miller for its design and Aviaja Fontain and Greenlandic Translate for the translation work. That additional access matters for a project about Greenlandic lives, while remaining distinct from the languages of this edition. In 2026, Spirals won the historical category of the Rencontres d’Arles book awards.
For collectors of documentary photography, its importance lies in bringing an investigation of reproductive control into the sustained reading space of a book. It can be considered alongside publications addressing colonial relationships, medical authority and the representation of people whose accounts have received insufficient attention. The combination of a defined historical inquiry and a photographer’s engagement with its human consequences gives the volume a clear place within that field, without reducing the women it concerns to an illustration of policy.
