Milk Factory
“The irony of Botz’s 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
Milk Factory makes the unseen labor inside America’s lactation rooms visible through a series of photographs, a short film, and a book. This project 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. Pumping seemed a more accurate reflection than breastfeeding of what being a parent looks like in a late-capitalist society that values productivity over health and attachments. The act of pumping highlights the ongoing negotiation in motherhood between connection and autonomy, and the ideological contradictions inherent in modern parenthood and public policies. I aim to make a space for these experiences and to honor this unrecognized labor through photography.
The United States remains the only high-income country in the world that does not offer paid family leave, causing many people to return to work soon after giving birth and contributing to the pervasiveness of pumping in the workplace. Lactation rooms underscore the demands for productivity in the workplace, along with the cultural expectations to love and care for a child. The arbitrary quality of many lactation rooms reflects the tenuous position new mothers inhabit in the workforce. The title Milk Factory emphasizes that lactation is a form of unpaid labor. 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.
