In Ilmatar, Japanese photographer Momo Okabe embarks on an intensely personal photographic exploration of gender, reproduction, and identity, created over a six-year period from 2014 to 2019 and released as a photobook in 2020. Recognized for her deeply autobiographical approach grounded in the Japanese I-novel literary tradition, Okabe documents her asexual pregnancy via in vitro fertilization.
The project features not only Okabe herself but also her close community of transgender friends, individuals often marginalized as societal outsiders, offering a collective meditation on nonconformity and the fluidity of identity. Okabe treats the act of photography as therapeutic, a form of visualizing her "psychological landscape" born from personal struggles and an introverted childhood. The title references a Finnish mythological figure, a virgin goddess who conceives without sexual union, aligning allegorically with Okabe's IVF experience and her conceptualization of the womb as a reproductive tool independent of gender-based identity.
Visually, the project eschews perfectionist compositional standards for a raw, mosaic-like flow of portraits, close-ups, landscapes, and scenes from daily life and medical procedures. It is characterized by a highly saturated, electric color palette—dominated by blue, red, purple, and yellow hues—that heightens the emotional charge of each image. The use of colored lighting imbues each frame with distinct atmosphere, contributing to the project’s oscillation between suffocation and serenity, eroticism and detachment, vulnerability and strength.
Ilmatar debuted at Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo (2020), accompanied by a photobook from Mandarake (2020) that was shortlisted for the Lucie Photo Book Prize. A new bilingual edition by Fisheye Éditions was launched at Rencontres d’Arles (2023–24). The series has since been exhibited in KYOTOGRAPHIE’s “10/10: Celebrating Contemporary Japanese Women Photographers” (Kyoto, 2022) and included in Aperture’s book and traveling exhibition "I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now" (from 2024), situating the project within current debates on gender and self-representation.
