The United States stands apart amongst prosperous countries in offering no federally required paid family leave, compelling millions of employed mothers to go back to work weeks or months after childbirth. This approach has rendered workplace lactation rooms a common feature across American offices, schools and hospitals—spaces where mothers must find time to express milk during breaks between meetings and lunch. Now, photographer Corinne May Botz has documented this hidden labour in a recently published book, Milk Factory, exposing the harsh truth of motherhood in contemporary American society through a series of powerful photographs captured within these formal environments. The work transforms the intimate practice of milk expression into a photographic examination with the contradictions between cultural expectations of maternal devotion and the unceasing pressures of professional obligations.
Why The United States’ Nursing Facilities Reveal a Bigger Story
Nursing spaces are far more than practical spaces for breastfeeding parents—they are monuments to a core paradox in American culture. These clinical and inadequately maintained rooms embody the disconnect between cultural narratives celebrating motherhood and the institutional policies that positions it as a private concern. By documenting through photography vacant pumping stations, forsaken furniture and barren shelves, Botz uncovers how institutions accommodate lactation whilst also marginalising it. The facilities serve as characters in a wider narrative about how late-capitalist societies expect women to sustain productivity whilst shouldering the physical and emotional work of child-rearing entirely alone.
Botz’s creative decision to exclude mothers and children from her images proves especially revealing. Rather than showing the intimate bond between parent and child, her photographs show the aftermath of pumping—the apparatus, the spaces, the infrastructure required to maintain lactation at work. This absence is telling, highlighting how contemporary mothering 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 expected to be simultaneously devoted caregivers and productive workers, without institutional support or legislative acknowledgement of this impossible dual burden.
- The US is the sole high-income nation without federally mandated paid family leave
- Nursing facilities highlight tensions between mothering responsibilities and work-related productivity expectations
- Numerous organisations are unaware they even possess nursing rooms on their premises
- Breast pumping symbolises the balance of connection and autonomy in modern parenthood
A Photographer’s View of Contemporary Motherhood
Corinne May Botz approached Milk Factory with a carefully considered framework, aiming to produce an unconventional portrait of motherhood through photography, film, and written work. Her vision went further than documenting personal experience; she sought to render visible the invisible labour that sustains American working mothers. When her own daughter was born, Botz discovered that maintaining lactation whilst going back to work required a complex balancing act—rushing between classrooms and lactation rooms, expressing milk at lunch breaks, and transporting breast pumps alongside professional equipment. This daily experience led her to document the spaces where motherhood and workplace productivity collide, converting what might seem ordinary into compelling artistic inquiry.
Botz’s project interrogates the ideological conflicts inherent in modern parenthood and American public policy. By exploring how mothers navigate the tension between connection to their children and the autonomy demanded by employment, she reveals systemic failures rather than individual shortcomings. The photographer understood 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 with critique, converting personal experience into a broader commentary on how institutions and policies neglect to support the fundamental work of raising children.
Taking away the Mother to Expose the System
Perhaps most provocatively, Botz chose to exclude mothers and children from her photographs entirely, instead documenting the aftermath of pumping. This deliberate absence fundamentally reshapes how viewers encounter the work of lactation. Rather than depicting intimate maternal bonds or nurturing moments, the images show empty pumping stations, abandoned apparatus, and sterile rooms devoid of human presence. By photographing post-pump spaces, Botz refuses the sentimentalised representations of motherhood that have dominated art history—predominantly painted by men—which typically celebrate breastfeeding as a symbol of motherly affection and care.
This artistic strategy reveals illuminating. Without mothers and children in attendance, viewers encounter the framework, the operational requirements, and the institutional accommodation of lactation as a work-related concern. The photographs serve as austere accounts of the material and physical systems required to maintain milk production whilst preserving work status. By removing the affective and interpersonal elements conventionally linked with motherhood, Botz reveals how contemporary capitalist structures transform maternal labour to a problem requiring practical solutions rather than genuine policy support or social recognition.
True Experiences from American Workplaces
Educators, Legal Professionals, and Service Staff
The photographs in Milk Factory capture the experiences of women across diverse professions, each managing the distinctive challenge of maintaining lactation whilst meeting workplace responsibilities. A educator describes the practical difficulties of hurrying between her upper-level teaching space across the street to access her school’s officially-required lactation room, only to find that security staff often were unaware the space existed. Meanwhile, administrative workers, musicians, and creative professionals found themselves fitting milk expression into lunch breaks, converting brief intervals into acts of mothering commitment. These testimonies reveal how lactation rooms, supposedly helpful infrastructure, actually formalise the demands of motherhood within institutional settings.
What emerges from these testimonies is a portrait of exhaustion concealed by workplace duty. Women describe eating lunch while pumping milk, or balancing cameras and tripods alongside breast pumps, recording their own invisible labour. The lactation room becomes a peculiar workplace feature—often barren, sometimes hard to reach, yet vital for women committed to continue nursing whilst keeping their jobs. These actual accounts highlight how individual women must devise their own solutions to systemic failures, converting personal resilience into narratives of triumph rather than demanding fundamental policy change.
The Surprising Compassion of Milk Producers
Among Botz’s subjects are agricultural workers whose everyday role involves handling milk production on a commercial basis. Photographed within their operational contexts, these farm workers inhabit a peculiar intersection—their specialist skill in dairy output contrasts sharply with their own experiences as lactating parents navigating American workplaces. Their inclusion in the project proves deeply significant, highlighting how society values the lactation of animals whilst simultaneously neglecting human mothers. The agricultural worker’s insight adds surprising dimension, suggesting that formal support for lactation exists more readily in agricultural contexts than in offices, schools, or hospitals.
The visibility of agricultural labourers in Milk Factory invites viewers to examine troubling similarities between the management of animal bodies and maternal bodies within capitalist economies. These women understand milk production thoroughly, yet their own milk production remains regarded as a individual issue requiring individual accommodation rather than systemic support. Their accounts highlight the irony embedded within American policies: society has created advanced systems for handling livestock milk production whilst allowing human mothers to improvise approaches within insufficient work environments.
Mothering Within Prison Walls
Perhaps most starkly, Botz’s project extends into correctional facilities, where incarcerated mothers experience more severe restrictions on lactation and child contact. Within prison lactation rooms, the constraints are starkly evident—these spaces represent not merely inconvenience but profound separation maintained through state authority. Incarcerated mothers must pump milk for children they cannot embrace, navigating lactation within systems built to prioritise punishment over mother-child bonds. These photographs demonstrate how the lactation room, already a symbol of institutional compromise, becomes something far more troubling within carceral settings.
The incorporation of prison lactation rooms reshapes Botz’s project into an indictment of how American systems abandon mothers across all circumstances, but most devastatingly those already excluded by incarceration. These images resist emotional appeal, instead documenting the mechanical reality of maintaining lactation whilst separated from one’s child by prison walls. The prison lactation room represents perhaps the starkest manifestation of how late-capitalist America handles maternal labour—not through real support, but through technical solutions that allows systems to continue functioning whilst mothers absorb all emotional and bodily costs.
The Study and Symbolic Meaning of Pump Operations
Breast pumping constitutes a profound technological intervention into the natural mechanisms of lactation, converting an personal moment of feeding into a mechanised labour that can be conducted alone. The pump itself functions as a representation of modern motherhood’s fundamental paradox: technology that enables maternal participation in the workforce whilst at the same time removing the bodily work of milk production from the interpersonal setting of nursing. What was once a personal physical engagement becomes countable, organised, and fundamentally productive—milk quantified by volume, time distributed by duration, bodies defined by their production capability.
Botz’s choice to capture the spaces after pumping rather than whilst pumping proves symbolically significant. By capturing the empty rooms and abandoned equipment, she makes apparent the unseen work that takes place in these spaces. The photographs document not motherhood itself but its mechanical remnant—the evidence of mothers labouring alone, maintaining biological processes whilst apart from the children those processes are designed to feed. This absence becomes presence, forcing viewers to confront what American society has accepted as standard: mothers expressing milk in state-required spaces during their break time, regarding their bodies’ reproductive capacity as a workplace accommodation rather than a basic human requirement.
- Pumping permits workforce participation whilst outsourcing maternal labour costs onto individual bodies
- The lactation room symbolises organisational trade-offs rather than genuine support for lactating parents
- Photographing empty spaces reveals the obscured, industrial logic of modern motherhood
A Project Gathering Urgency in Uncertain Times
Botz’s project emerges at a moment when American motherhood faces unprecedented pressures. The absence of federally required paid leave for families continues to be a pronounced policy inadequacy that sets apart the United States from every other high-income nation. This structural inadequacy compels millions of mothers to go back to work within weeks of delivery, transforming breast pumping from an occasional convenience into a everyday work obligation. The lactation room, ostensibly a progressive accommodation, functions instead as a superficial remedy that addresses symptoms whilst disregarding systemic failures. By documenting these spaces, Botz reveals not advancement but the persistence of a fundamentally broken approach to aiding employed parents.
The timing of Milk Factory proves especially resonant as conversations around mothers’ wellbeing, workforce equity, and childcare accessibility mount across America. Botz’s photographs and accompanying narratives compel audiences to acknowledge what has turned ordinary: mothers navigating bureaucratic obstacles to access lactation rooms, rushing between classrooms and government-mandated spaces, pumping whilst eating lunch or speaking via video with relatives. These photographs resist romanticising motherhood or praise technology as sufficient. Instead, they require recognition of the hidden costs carried by mothers, exposing how contemporary economic structures value productivity over the essential requirements of mothers and babies.