Milky Way

Milky Way follows the French photographer Vincent Ferrané's wife and newborn child through six months of breastfeeding, an act he found himself struck by after the birth of his first child and set out to document without concealment or gloss.

The 62 colour plates were shot with a single small camera chosen for its embedded flash and clean definition, so the images could sit as comfortably in an intimate book as printed large. Ferrané frames the project against the Greek myth in which the galaxy was formed from the milk of the goddess Hera, reading the everyday choreography of feeding as its own kind of world-building; the geometry the act imposes on two bodies recurs picture to picture, echoing older icons of nursing motherhood without tidying up the moment. Libraryman published the book as a clothbound hardcover in 2017, in a first edition of 500 with a smaller signed special edition in a screen-printed slipcase.

Ferrané (b. 1974) works across fashion and personal documentary photography; Milky Way, made from material closest to home, was followed by Visitor (2018), a series of portraits of women artists in their studios, also published by Libraryman.