milk and tears uses mother’s breastmilk as a salting solution in the historical salted paper process to make prints that reflect on nourishment, bodily memory as transferred through ancestry, and society’s reliance on the unsupported labor of parenting. Breastmilk adds bodily labor to the print, while also injecting a uniquely feminist narrative into the history of photography. Still lifes of stacked blocks serve as totems to the intimate and often private struggle of the postpartum period. They are precariously balanced, serving as a visual metaphor for our impossible ideals of trying to balance our work and home lives, our public and private selves, to “have it all.” Each print is unique as tonal shifts and fat splatters swirl like small galaxies. These differences remind us that our bodies are not machines, but imperfect organisms. They encourage acceptance and understanding while countering the perfectionist rhetoric ingrained in the photographic medium.
The project has collaborated with over fifty fellow mothers to date, each of whom has been invited to coat paper with their breastmilk, introducing their hand into the work. My son’s tears are also added as a secondary source of salt, further alluding to the emotional tensions of intimacy and mothering. Our modern society overlooks care as something frivolous and sequestered, but this work exposes care as a necessary building block, the key to meaningful connection to each other and our environment.