by Susan Bright

You would have had to have been living in a cave not to have noticed the increased interest in celebrity moms in the media over the last decade. From judgmental and vicious attacks on Nadya Doud-Suleman (more commonly referred to as the "Octomom"), to hyperbolic revelry at the Duchess of Cambridge giving birth to Prince George, the insatiable media mill has placed an unprecedented level of scrutiny on mothers.

Of course it's not a one-way street. Celebrities tweet, Instagram and Facebook their way through their pregnancies. Thinly disguised as sisterly sharing, it often comes across as sanctimonious showing off, and celebrity and audience alike are more aware that the act of becoming a mother can provide valuable exposure.

However, if you take away the captions and just look at the pictures, what is revealed is a series of old stereotypes: the Madonna motif is repeated, families snuggle together in group hugs and young babies are held up while the mother looks adoringly into their eyes. What's most intriguing about the representation of celebrity mothering in popular culture is what's missing: pictures of breastfeeding and the postpartum body.

The reaction to Kate Middleton's weight as she left hospital just days after giving birth revealed that the public is not very good at dealing with realistic pictures of mothering. The fact that so many people were shocked indicates their ignorance that a bump doesn't instantly disappear once a baby has been born. This in itself is not shameful; how can people know this if they have not gone through the experience and have seen no pictures which normalise this?

Photographers have attempted to address this misconception. Two recent projects celebrated the postpartum body – Jade Beall's A Beautiful Body and The 4th Trimester Bodies Project by Ashlee Wells Jackson – and went viral on the internet. Shot in a purposefully arty, studio setup in tasteful black and white, they have overtones of Dove's "empowering" commercials of real women. However, the poses still repeat the same old tropes, only naked.

Breasts are even more complicated. Photographic representation of breastfeeding can be read as a shortcut for instant shock value, especially when on pages generally more associated with fashion imagery. In 2006 Steven Klein shot the model Angela Lindvall nursing her son Sebastian for American Vogue, following in the footsteps of Annie Leibovitz, who photographed Jerry Hall breastfeeding her son Gabriel for the cover of the Australian's weekend magazine in 1999. Both of these images have a high level of authority and visual charge that's at odds with the more nurturing and benign Madonna, but they are essentially fashion photographs of models who are well practised at posing.

Occasionally, one glimpses paparazzi shots of a celebrity shrouding their baby and breast with what is indelicately called a "hooter hider" in the US. But there was a huge backlash against the recent Time cover of Jamie Lynne Grumet nursing her three-year-old son, photographed by Martin Schoeller. In this case it was of course not only the exposure of the breast, but the fact that her son was not a newborn that caused indignation. Societal values associated with age and breastfeeding are confused: Britain suggests an arbitrary six months, the US recommends a year and the World Health Organisation advocates at least two.

Breastfeeding sits in the middle of two very contradictory forces. On one hand it is simply not represented in popular culture; it has yet to be normalised by the sheer repetition of seeing it every day online, on television or in print media. But on the other hand women are shamed if they do not do it. Governmental forces and lobby groups insist it is best, but how can women comfortably do it if it is not accepted visually? The British poet Hollie McNish has written of these overwhelming feelings of shame and being forced to breastfeed in a public toilet, her "baby's first sips are drown-drenched in shite".

Can photography change these attitudes? In 1991, when Leibovitz photographed a heavily pregnant Demi Moore for the cover of Vanity Fair, the western world was shocked. Now the web is awash with pregnant women "doing a Demi" and pregnancy has come out of the shadows of subjects that cannot be publicly represented.

It's up to photographers, photo editors and art directors to be brave enough to commission and publish photos which give new mothers a visual rubric in which to feel comfortable enough to nurse publicly. Facebook needs to lift its ridiculous nipple ban and nursing pictures should be no big deal on Instagram feeds.

When images of breastfeeding and postpartum tummies enter our popular culture, they will help to provide a path away from ignorance and embarrassment.