PAST COMMUNITY

Corinne Botz “Milk Factory” Book Talk and Conversation with Alice Proujansky

Join us at 154 Ludlow St on March 7 at 4PM for the New York City launch of Corinne Botz’s new book Milk Factory (Saint Lucy Books). Milk Factory, the first visual study of America’s lactation rooms, is an embodied study of reproductive labor and the architectures of care. The evening will open with a short screening of the project’s film, Milk Factory (10 minutes), which offers a rare glimpse into the
lactation suite in the U.S. House of Representatives, where women across political divides find unexpected connections. Botz will be joined in conversation by artist Alice Proujansky, followed
by a Q&A with the audience. The evening will conclude with a book signing.

This event is free to attend and child-friendly.

ABOUT MILK FACTORY

Milk Factory (Saint Lucy Books) records the invisible labor of lactation in America, taking
viewers into radically different sites such as a prison, banking firm, farm laborers’ tent, schools,
an airport, and the U.S. Capitol. Corinne Botz’s photographs honor this unrecognized labor while
challenging romanticized narratives of motherhood and exposing contradictions in modern
parenthood and public policy. The photographs are accompanied by essays from Corinne Botz,
Hettie Judah, and Mathilde Cohen, along with first-hand accounts of pumping experiences from
women across the socio-economic spectrum. Testimonies, from a police officer pushed to
exhaustion in a hostile workplace to a bereaved mother who donated milk after loss,
demonstrate how lived experience becomes political evidence. Through these images and
accounts, Milk Factory reframes private struggles as collective realities, initiating space for
public discourse on invisible labor and maternal justice.
The short film Milk Factory (10:47 min.) offers a rare glimpse into a lactation suite in the
U.S. House of Representatives, created by Nancy Pelosi, where women across political divides
find connection. In an era of deep polarization, these moments of shared experience underscore
the urgent need for legislation that supports families. Despite progress, including the passage
of the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act during one of the filming dates, the United States
remains the only high-income country without mandated paid family leave. The lack of care
forces many people to return to work soon after giving birth, contributing to the pervasiveness
of pumping in the workplace. Highlighting the growth of lactation rooms while addressing
systemic issues affecting women —particularly women of color and working parents — Milk
Factory resonates as a portrait of advocacy, calling for policy change that affirms caregiving as
essential for all families.

ABOUT CORINNE BOTZ

Corinne May Botz is a visual artist and educator based in New York whose practice encompasses photography, writing, and filmmaking. A sustained focus on space, gender, and the body, particularly relating to women’s experiences, is central to her practice. Her published books combining photography and writing include The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Phaidon/Monacelli Press, 2004), Haunted Houses (Phaidon/Monacelli Press, 2010), and Milk Factory (Saint Lucy Books, 2025). Botz’s photographs have been internationally exhibited at such institutions as the Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; Wellcome Collection; De Appel, Amsterdam; and Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at Benrubi Gallery and Bellwether
Gallery in New York City; Alice Austen House, Hudson Hall, Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington D.C. and RedLine Gallery in Denver, Colorado. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, Granta, Foam Magazine, Bookforum, Art Papers, Modern Painters, Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, Exit,Slate, Time: Lightbox, and Ciel Variable. Her Oscar-qualifying short film Bedside Manner (2016) won the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC. She is the recipient of both the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation grants. Botz is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography and John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).

ABOUT ALICE PROUJANKSY

Alice Proujansky is a photographer and quilter looking at family labor: birth, work, motherhood and identity. Her photobook, Hard Times are Fighting Times (Gnomic Book, 2023), uses archival and documentary images to look at the legacy of radical activism in her family. It was shortlisted for a 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award and the Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award, and was selected for exhibition through BAXTER ST’s Mid-Career Artists Initiative. She is working on a photobook about culturally-responsive birth work and a photography/quilting project about psychological formation and motherhood. Her work has been supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, International Women’s Media Foundation, Magnum Foundation, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, NewYork State Council on the Arts and Peleh Fund. She has been published by Aperture, Fraction Magazine, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review and others. Alice has taught photography since 2002, most recently for Aperture. A member of Women Photograph, Alice grew up in Greenfield, MA. She graduated from New York University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.