Blood & Milk
photographs capturing my own blood and breastmilk
photographs capturing my own blood and breastmilk
I was five months pregnant when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. My son was born into a reality in which the intimate routines of early motherhood: feeding, holding, soothing - existed alongside a constant stream of images from the war.
I often breastfed him with my phone in my hand, watching videos of missile strikes and homes reduced to rubble. I was nourishing one small body while witnessing the destruction of others. The two experiences became impossible to separate.
Making these photographs, I began to think about what we ask milk and blood to represent. Milk suggests nourishment, intimacy, and protection. Blood suggests injury, sacrifice, and death. But motherhood unsettled that division for me. Birth contains blood. Feeding can bring pain. The body carries tenderness and violence at once.
Heraclitus described war as “the father of all.” During that first year with my son, I began to imagine war differently: as a sorrowful mother, giving birth to grief, rupture, and recurring cycles of destruction.
Can war, too, be a mother?
2024