In this episode of Mindworks in Conversation, Tony Errichetti speaks with photographer and filmmaker Corinne May Botz about her latest work, Milk Factory, exploring the realities of pumping and working motherhood.
Join Mindworks in Conversation for an illuminating dialogue with photographer and filmmaker Corinne May Botz about her groundbreaking work, Milk Factory.
By photographing pumping rooms, milk bottles, and emptied spaces rather than bodies, she critiques invisibility through absence, revealing how architecture, workplace policy, and language render care both private and political. The project expands outward—from personal experience to structural inequity—linking motherhood to public policy, economic systems, and cultural narratives about productivity. At once documenting isolation and cultivating solidarity, Milk Factory invites empathy across boundaries and challenges us to reconsider how societies value care, whose labor counts, and who is asked to remain unseen.
Botz’s work and ideas are receiving renewed attention in the press, including coverage in Chronogram. Her photographs resist spectacle; instead, they ask viewers to pause, look carefully, and reconsider the infrastructures—emotional, social, and material—that structure our lives. Whether addressing lactation technology, domestic interiors, patient simulation, or the supernatural imagination, Botz consistently reveals how systems of power and care intersect in the most intimate spaces.
In this essential conversation, we explore:
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Critique Through Absence: How photographing empty pumping rooms and milk bottles (rather than bodies) exposes systemic failures.
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Policy & Inequity: The intersection of workplace policy, architecture, and the fight for adequate lactation spaces and paid family leave.
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Structural Power: Linking personal maternal experience to economic systems and cultural narratives of productivity.
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The Human Element: Stories of isolation and the cultivation of solidarity among mothers, from dairy farmers to incarcerated individuals (Alabama Prison Birth Project).
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Reconsidering Value: Challenging viewers to pause and reassess how society values care work and who is forced to remain unseen.
Don't miss this vital discussion that reveals how systems of power structure our most intimate lives.
