The Invisible Breasts is an exhibition and a photo book (bilingual English/Swedish) about breastfeeding and breasts. It started as a resistance project in 2013, when I started noticing that Swedish women who breastfed in public were beginning to be harassed. I realized there had been a shift in society and more control was put on women compared to when I was a child, when for instance everybody were topless on the beaches and public swimming centers. I never thought that being topless on the beach would be a strange thing (though I know things are different in The US) and I remember being topless together with my mother and grandmother who were also topless. But now I understood that something was shifting; little girls has become ashamed of taking showers with their class mates after gymnastics at school, breastfeeding rates are decreasing in Sweden and the “beauty surgeries” are increasing.

I was also concerned about the common, often very romanticised image of breastfeeding women. I fgured we need role models to identify with, more than we need untrue and “impossible-to-reach-ideals” so I asked the women to pick a situation where they would normally breastfeed and made the picture in that situation. The situations vary from breastfeeding while bicycling, while buying groceries or visiting the shopping mall,or while playing the violin in a summer party. Every picture has it´s own story as has every woman in the project.

At every opening of the exhibition I invite the visitors to become part of the exhibition and have their own breastfeeding picture taken by me, during the opening. Therefore the exhibition is slowly growing with every new opening with the goal to tenfold the number of pictures and make a new photo book. I regard it a resistance movement to put light on which pictures of (breastfeeding) women are shown in society and how social structures can hinder or promote women and children of being in public space during the breastfeeding period.