Milk Factory

The irony of Botz’ still-life photographs is to make lactating labor more visible by ellipsis. The compositions focus on the materiality of the space, the pump, and the bottles of expressed milk. Women are conspicuously missing from the frame. Babies only appear as pictures within the pictures. This double absence—of mothers and their children—highlights our society’s preference for human milk as a disembodied product, rather than an affective relationship. Why else do laws and policies facilitate lactation through the provision of breaks, rooms, and pumps, implying the separation of parents and children?
- Mathilde Cohen, Professor of Law

This series originated as a personal record of my early experience as a mother after I gave birth to my daughter and took a photograph of the oddly sparse room I pumped in at the College where I teach. A few years later, realizing the relationship of this image to my other work as an exploration of space, I decided to expand the project to create an unconventional portrait of motherhood. Lactation rooms embody deeply felt, subjective experiences of motherhood. Symbolically and materially, expressed milk simulates physical and emotional intimacy when mother and child are separated. These little-known and commonly unseen interiors offer insight into women’s personal experiences, the maternal body’s status in the workplace, and fundamental socio-political issues pertaining to the family. Any investigation of lactation rooms must acknowledge the absence of policy for mandated paid maternity leave in America. Through my images I endeavor to help normalize pumping, create a public discourse concerning the politics of care, and highlight the importance of women’s voices/visibility. The photographs are named for the diverse professions of the pumping women. The solitary pumping rooms take on collective power through the accumulation of photographs.

PRESS
“Yet by contrast, from a darkened schoolroom to the interior lined with empty bookshelves that Botz used, the spaces are typically spare and impersonal. They embody another aspect of motherhood, a feeling of being “solitary” even in the context of community. Milk Factory displays the contradictions experienced by mothers as they navigate new roles in unfamiliar settings, intertwining physical space and personal lives and highlighting the simultaneous connection and disconnection between mothers and babies while separated.”
- Merrily Kerr, Mana Contemporary

“Botz’ images reflect the contradictions inherent in contemporary parenthood. The title Milk Factory underlines that lactation is a form of labor, even if federal law conceptualizes it as a break from work, which employers are not required to compensate. Breastfeeding is not cost free. It can be painful; requires time, know-how, and equipment; and has an opportunity cost. Maternal and infant health advocate Kimberly Seals Allers calculated that “at a proposed federal minimum wage of $15 per hour” lactating women would receive “$16,200 for six months of exclusive breastfeeding.” In practice, sociologists Phyllis Rippeyoung and Mary Noonan have shown that the longer women breastfeed, the more severe and prolonged the earning losses they suffer.”
- Mathilde Cohen, TIME magazine

“Botz photographs the rooms right after her subjects finish pumping milk. She asks the women to leave everything as it is, and then they step out of the frame. Their absence leaves the viewer to focus on the objects and the spaces, which are often strange—empty cubicles, rooms with bare walls or thrown-together decoration. Botz names the images after the women’s professional titles or the places they work.”
-PDN

“With her 4 x 5 film camera and digital medium format system, Botz has been invited into the varied spaces, some sanctioned and comfortable and others improvised and “multipurpose,” where women go several times a day to pump milk when working and away from their children. Her work engages with the mothers but, like most of her previous projects, is focused more on the often-overlooked details of the spaces we occupy, inviting the viewer to enter these rooms and gain an understanding of what they might signify to the mothers themselves and, of course, to ask us to recognize how we prioritize space for the needs of motherhood and, in turn, healthy families.”
- B&H Photography Podcast

Further Research:
Reach about an interdisciplinary collaboration with Mathlide Cohen exploring what the pandemic is doing to lactation practices on Ms. Magazine