While there is a personal, poetic tenderness to the images, Ferrane is keen to point out that he did not want to romanticize them — there are moments of severe tiredness and signifiers of the harsh realities of being a new mother and the strain of that on the body and the mind. He said it was incredibly important for him to give an honest portrait of it, in all its complexity. “That’s why I also included still-life images of breastfeeding paraphernalia too — the breast pumps, the bathrooms and so on,” he says. “I wanted to take that classical idea of the ‘noble’ image of a breastfeeding mother and replace it with images of the everyday experience of it. As parents, you naturally and immediately incorporate these elements into your life and you find them beautiful, so I tried to do the same as a photographer, finding an aesthetic language that does not stop at what is normally considered ‘beautiful’ or worthy of interest.”