“What You Cannot Get Over”: A Photographic Essay Exploring Reproductive Failure, Affect, and Information Work

This photographic essay explores five mixed-media pieces created from photographs of selections from the author’s Archive of Reproductive Failure. As a series, “What You Cannot Get Over” chronicles the author’s experiences with infertility and pregnancy loss and compels readers to sit with, think about, and take seriously reproductive failures and the attendant labor—affective and information work— involved. Themes addressed include embodiment and information work; affective encounters with others and with information sources; reproductive failure as impediment to information work; information seeking and accumulation; the calling upon and turning from “expertise”; documenting failure and loss; and implications for information organizations and professional practice. Using Scuro’s “griefwork” as a major framing device, “What You Cannot Get Over” validates what is often read as failed or unproductive labor, instead honoring it, rendering it visible and valuable.