shashasha

Following her highly acclaimed books “Dildo” (2013) and “Bible” (2014, both published by NY-based Session Press), “Irmatar” is Japanese photographer Momo Okabe’s first photobook published in Japan.
In her signature style of intense, strong colors and her no-holds-barred approach, in “Irmatar” Okabe explores her experience as a nonsexual woman and her close-knit group of friends – many of them transgender – in contemporary Japan, with subjects ranging from close-ups and nudes to landscapes and intimate moments of sexual and emotional nature. The book’s main subject and guiding thread is Okabe’s own artificial insemination, pregnancy and delivery of her firstborn child.

“Under the piercing sunlight, the city appeared to be beaming.
In the car going home, the baby kept watching the burning city.

When I point my camera at them, I see me there.
I think of people I cannot see again.
In me they live forever;
I sometimes become a man, and sometimes a woman, and used a womb as a tool to give birth.”
(from Momo Okabe’s afterword)