love’s labor is an ongoing project that utilizes mother’s breastmilk as a salting solution 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. The wide range of color and tonal discrepancies displayed by salt prints are amplified when using this unhomogenized organic material. 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 harmful perfectionist rhetoric engrained in the photographic medium.
This work has collaborated with forty other mothers to date. Each mother is taught to coat their own paper, introducing their hand to the prints and creating a traveling lesson on the process. In some cases, formula is also used if it is more representative of a parent’s particular breast or chest-feeding journey. Images of family and community gardens are additionally included to honor the mothers’ own practices of care, as well as to reference continued nourishment through the land and the tension between the presumptive ‘natural’ experience of parenting in simultaneous conjunction and conflict with the environment.
With thanks to the generous support of Culture Source, the Andy Warhol Foundation, College for Creative Studies, and Arts and Scraps.
