The United States remains distinct amongst prosperous countries in failing to provide federally mandated paid family leave, compelling millions of employed mothers to go back to work several weeks to months after giving birth. This policy has rendered nursing rooms a common feature across American offices, schools and hospitals—spaces where mothers must steal moments to pump milk during breaks between meetings and lunch. Now, photographer Corinne May Botz has captured this invisible work in a recently published book, Milk Factory, revealing the stark reality of maternal experience in contemporary American society through a series of powerful photographs captured within these formal environments. The project transforms the private act of milk expression into a visual reckoning with the contradictions between cultural expectations of maternal devotion and the unceasing pressures of workplace productivity.
Why America’s Lactation Rooms Reveal a Larger Story
Lactation rooms are considerably more than functional areas for breastfeeding parents—they are testaments to a fundamental contradiction in American society. These sterile and frequently neglected rooms symbolise the disconnect between cultural narratives celebrating motherhood and the institutional policies that positions it as a individual responsibility. By documenting through photography empty pumping stations, abandoned chairs and bare storage units, Botz reveals how organisations provide for lactation whilst simultaneously marginalising it. The spaces in question become characters in a bigger narrative about how late-capitalist societies require women to sustain productivity whilst carrying the physical and emotional work of raising children entirely alone.
Botz’s artistic choice to remove mothers and children from her images proves particularly revealing. Rather than depicting the intimate bond between parent and child, her photographs show the aftermath of pumping—the apparatus, the spaces, the systems required to maintain lactation at work. This absence speaks volumes, highlighting how modern motherhood has been reduced to a logistical problem to be handled during lunch breaks. The project pushes viewers to confront uncomfortable truths: that American mothers are required to function as simultaneously devoted caregivers and productive workers, without systemic backing or legislative acknowledgement of this impossible dual burden.
- The US is the sole wealthy country without federally required paid family leave
- Nursing facilities underscore conflicts among mothering responsibilities and workplace productivity demands
- Numerous organisations are unaware they actually have lactation facilities on site
- Pumping symbolises the negotiation of autonomy and connection in modern parenthood
A Photographer’s Vision of Modern Mothering
Corinne May Botz approached Milk Factory with a carefully considered framework, aiming to produce an unconventional portrait of motherhood through photography, film and book form. Her vision went further than documenting individual lived experience; she aimed to make visible the invisible labour that supports American working mothers. When her own daughter was born, Botz found that maintaining lactation whilst returning to work required a peculiar negotiation—rushing between classrooms and lactation rooms, expressing milk at lunch breaks, and carrying breast pumps alongside professional equipment. This daily experience prompted her to document the spaces where motherhood and workplace productivity intersect, converting what might seem ordinary into compelling artistic inquiry.
Botz’s project interrogates the ideological contradictions inherent in modern parenthood and American public policy. By investigating how mothers manage the tension between closeness with their children and the autonomy necessitated by employment, she uncovers systemic failures rather than individual shortcomings. The photographer recognised that pumping, far more than breastfeeding, captures contemporary motherhood in a late-capitalist society that prioritises productivity over health and emotional attachments. Her artistic practice served as a form of documentation and critique, reshaping personal experience into a more expansive critique on how institutions and policies neglect to support the fundamental work of raising children.
Removing the Mother to Uncover the System
Perhaps most provocatively, Botz deliberately omitted mothers and children from her photographs entirely, instead documenting the aftermath of pumping. This deliberate absence fundamentally transforms how audiences engage with the work of lactation. Rather than depicting intimate mother-child connections or nurturing moments, the images show empty pumping stations, abandoned apparatus, and sterile rooms stripped of human presence. By photographing post-pump spaces, Botz refuses the sentimentalised representations of motherhood that pervade art history—predominantly painted by men—which typically celebrate breastfeeding as a symbol of motherly affection and care.
This artistic strategy demonstrates illuminating. Without mothers and children present, viewers encounter the framework, the practical arrangements, and the institutional accommodation of lactation as a workplace management challenge. The photographs become austere accounts of the technological and spatial infrastructure required to maintain milk production whilst preserving work status. By stripping away the affective and interpersonal elements conventionally linked with motherhood, Botz reveals how late-capitalist systems transform maternal labour to a issue necessitating pragmatic fixes rather than meaningful policy intervention or societal validation.
True Experiences from Workplaces Across America
Instructors, Barristers, and Support Staff
The photographs in Milk Factory capture the experiences of women across diverse professions, each managing the peculiar difficulty in maintaining lactation whilst meeting workplace responsibilities. A teacher describes the logistical nightmare of rushing from her upper-level teaching space across the street to reach her school’s officially-required lactation room, only to find that security guards often remained unaware the space existed. Meanwhile, office staff, musicians, and design practitioners found themselves squeezing pumping sessions into midday breaks, converting brief intervals into acts of mothering commitment. These accounts demonstrate how lactation rooms, supposedly helpful infrastructure, actually formalise the demands of motherhood within institutional settings.
What comes to light from these testimonies is a picture of exhaustion concealed by workplace duty. Women recount simultaneously pumping milk and eating lunch, or balancing cameras and tripods alongside breast pumps, recording their own invisible labour. The lactation room becomes a peculiar workplace feature—often sparse, sometimes difficult to access, yet vital for women determined to keep breastfeeding whilst keeping their jobs. These real stories highlight how individual women must engineer their own answers to structural problems, converting personal resilience into stories of success rather than demanding substantial policy reform.
The Remarkable Compassion of Dairy Farmers
Among Botz’s subjects are agricultural workers whose everyday role involves overseeing lactation on an industrial scale. Photographed within their workplace settings, these farm workers inhabit a unusual position—their occupational knowledge in milk production contrasts sharply with their own experiences as nursing mothers navigating American workplaces. Their inclusion in the project proves deeply significant, highlighting how society values the lactation of animals whilst simultaneously failing to support human mothers. The dairy farmer’s perspective adds considerable nuance, suggesting that organisational provision for lactation exists more readily in rural environments than in offices, schools, or hospitals.
The presence of agricultural labourers in Milk Factory invites viewers to consider uncomfortable parallels between the management of livestock and motherhood within capitalist systems. These women comprehend milk production thoroughly, yet their own lactation remains regarded as a individual issue requiring individual accommodation rather than structural solutions. Their accounts highlight the irony embedded within American policy: society has created advanced systems for handling livestock milk production whilst allowing working mothers to devise solutions within inadequate workplace spaces.
Mothering Behind Carceral Institutions
Perhaps most starkly, Botz’s project extends into correctional facilities, where incarcerated mothers encounter increasingly severe restrictions on lactation and child contact. Within prison lactation rooms, the constraints emerge with stark clarity—these spaces represent not merely inconvenience but profound separation imposed by state authority. Incarcerated mothers must pump milk for children they are unable to hold, navigating lactation within systems constructed to emphasise punishment over mother-child bonds. These photographs demonstrate how the lactation room, already a symbol of institutional concession, becomes something considerably more disturbing within carceral settings.
The presence of prison lactation rooms reshapes Botz’s project into a condemnation of how systems in America fail mothers across all circumstances, but most catastrophically those already excluded by incarceration. These images reject sentimentality, instead documenting the clinical reality of maintaining lactation whilst apart from one’s child by institutional walls. The prison lactation room becomes perhaps the clearest manifestation of how contemporary American capitalism handles maternal labour—not through real support, but through technical solutions that allows systems to operate whilst mothers bear all psychological and physical burdens.
The Science and Symbolism of Pumping
Breast pumping represents a significant mechanical intrusion into the natural mechanisms of lactation, transforming an personal moment of feeding into a mechanised labour that can be performed in isolation. The pump itself functions as a representation of modern motherhood’s fundamental paradox: technology that enables maternal participation in the labour market whilst simultaneously extracting the physical labour of milk production from the intimate framework of infant feeding. What was once a intimate bodily act becomes quantifiable, schedulable, and ultimately productive—milk measured in ounces, time allocated in minutes, bodies reduced to their capacity for output.
Botz’s decision to photograph the spaces following the pumping process rather than whilst pumping holds profound symbolic weight. By capturing the vacant spaces and abandoned equipment, she makes apparent the invisible labour that occurs within these spaces. The photographs document not motherhood itself but its mechanical remnant—the evidence of maternal bodies labouring alone, maintaining biological processes whilst separated from the children those processes are meant to nourish. This absence transforms into presence, forcing viewers to face what American society has accepted as standard: mothers pumping milk in state-required spaces during their break time, regarding their bodies’ reproductive capacity as a work-based provision rather than a fundamental human need.
- Pumping enables labour force engagement whilst transferring motherhood expenses onto women’s bodies
- The lactation room represents institutional compromise rather than meaningful backing for nursing mothers
- Photographing empty spaces reveals the obscured, mechanised nature of present-day mothering
A Project Gathering Momentum in Challenging Times
Botz’s project arrives at a moment when American motherhood confronts significant strain. The non-existence of federally required paid leave for families remains a glaring policy failure that sets apart the United States from any other prosperous country. This structural inadequacy requires millions of mothers to return to work just weeks after childbirth, converting breast pumping from an occasional convenience into a daily workplace necessity. The lactation room, purportedly a forward-thinking measure, serves as a temporary fix that addresses symptoms whilst disregarding structural problems. By documenting these spaces, Botz documents not improvement but the endurance of a profoundly inadequate framework to supporting working parents.
The moment of Milk Factory proves particularly resonant as discussions around mothers’ wellbeing, workplace equality, and childcare accessibility mount across America. Botz’s images with supporting text push observers to see what has grown routine: mothers navigating bureaucratic obstacles to access lactation rooms, moving across classrooms and government-mandated spaces, pumping whilst eating lunch or video-chatting with relatives. These photographs resist romanticising motherhood or praise technology as sufficient. Instead, they require recognition of the unseen burdens borne by women themselves, exposing how contemporary economic structures prioritise output over the fundamental human needs of parents and infants alike.