Intimate Portraits of Mothers Breast-Feeding Their Babies

Francesca Cesari said she had never aesthetically appreciated the breast-feeding bond until a friend of hers took a break from their portrait session to breast-feed her baby.

“I was not living that situation anymore,” Cesari, who breast-fed her son until he was 9 months old, wrote via email. “So I had the chance to observe the scene with new eyes, keeping a huge amount of empathy and knowledge but also being free of the emotional involvement I had experienced in the past.”

The next day, she picked up her camera to begin an intimate, ongoing project of mothers breast-feeding their babies she titled “In the Room.”

Cesari said using her camera to record the experience gave her the “chance to isolate the gestures and the subjects from their daily context and to highlight that intimate, symbiotic atmosphere I encountered the first time.”

She found the mothers in the series through friends and then friends of friends and word of mouth in Bologna, Italy, where she lives, as well as in nearby cities. Although many women were comfortable posing for her, some were shy and asked her not to photograph their nude bodies.

“One of the great things about this work and in general about dealing with people is to experience how in front of the same situation you can have a multitude of different reactions,” she wrote. “The fact of me being a woman helped a lot because even with strangers there always was a silent understanding and solidarity.”

Cesari said she isn’t much of a traveler but would like to expand the series outside of Italy, but she noted that cultural norms might prevent her from making that happen everywhere.

“I would certainly explore how the moment of breastfeeding babies to sleep is experienced by women of other cultures and I’m working on that,” she wrote.

Each portrait session lasts for a few hours. Cesari spends time figuring out how the light in the room will affect the photograph; she feels as humans we live in degrees of shades that add dimension and emotion to our lives.

“I don’t want to lose this information because it’s part of their character and it’s a further element to get closer to the person in front of me,” she wrote. “This is the main reason why I love to photograph people at home, because the person I portray is not only the human being I see through the lens but also the universe around him.”

She and her subject pick a time to do the shoot, but since they’re reliant on the baby, there is a lot of improvising: Sometimes the baby falls asleep, and other times he or she throws up after nursing, which doesn’t make for the most appealing images.

“In those cases I don’t necessarily go on forever to get the perfect moment,” Cesari wrote. “It’s more important not to add tension to an already difficult situation. The right image comes from the unexpected, and if the picture isn’t always taken in the precise second when the baby gets asleep, but during the process of comforting, embracing or calming down, that equally conveys the message I want to give, because all of that is part of the process.”