What do lactation rooms say about a society that expects breastfeeding but treats care as a private responsibility?
My latest book Milk Factory (from Saint Lucy Books) is the first visual study of America’s lactation rooms. Photographing spaces where mothers pump—disparate sites such as a prison, corporate offices, a farm laborer’s tent, schools, an airport and the U.S. Capitol—I reveal the hidden architecture of care. I wanted to give participants a record of their labor and make that labor visible to others.
Milk Factory paints an unconventional portrait of motherhood. The interdisciplinary project examines the economic, legal and emotional realities of contemporary parenthood in a society that treats care as a private responsibility rather than a shared public good.
I employed a large-format film camera to record these spaces, a slow and deliberate tool historically used to capture interiors and still lifes. The resulting photographs, combined with essays by writer and curator Hettie Judah and legal scholar Mathilde Cohen, along with firsthand accounts from people across professions and socioeconomic backgrounds—a business consultant carrying a pump between meetings; a bartender in a supply closet; a teacher rushing to a lactation room between classes.
Together, these narratives demonstrate how lived experience becomes political evidence, bringing authority to a subject that has long been marginalized.
I intentionally leave mothers out of the frame, creating conceptual portraits. This shifts attention away from the maternal body and toward the environments and personal objects within them, opening up a more complex form of empathy.
… a society that treats care as a private responsibility rather than a shared public good.
Milk Factory includes testimonies of pumping experiences from women across the United States: from a nurse who pumped during the New York City Marathon, to a prison doula helping incarcerated mothers stay connected to their infants, to a police officer who was driven to the point of breakdown trying to pump milk in a hostile work environment.
Born out of <a href=”https://msmagazine.com/2021/01/26/online-breastfeeding-nursing-lactation-zoom-video-call/“>my own experience,</a> Milk Factory is personal and political. It challenges romanticized portrayals of motherhood and breastfeeding, underscoring the complexity and labor behind an act that is widely expected but rarely supported.
Through images and text, I bring together these solitary experiences of pumping, allowing them to accumulate into a collective portrait of caregiving, labor and resilience in contemporary America.
Milk Factory is available for purchase through Saint Lucy Books.
