Donning a fake bump, a photographer blurs fiction and reality in an intimate exploration of motherhood

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — After Naima Green married her wife and fellow artist, Sable Elyse Smith, suddenly it seemed as if everyone in their orbit was curious if a baby would follow.

As a teacher, Green loves children, and she has often photographed pregnant friends and new parents as a gesture for her next chapter. But she is ambivalent about having kids of her own, she explained during a phone interview. Like many people her age, she’s gone back and forth on the reality of it, from what would happen to the life and artistic practice she’s built in New York, to how realistic it would be to conceive. Three years ago, at age 32, a doctor told her she should have begun trying years earlier, which was somewhat unactionable advice without a time machine.

Still, she felt a pull toward pregnancy she didn’t quite understand: “Is it about having a child that I’m raising for the rest of my life, or is about this fixation on what people’s bodies go through?”

Like many artists who have roleplayed different versions of their lives, Green considered turning the camera on herself. She purchased a 20-pound artificial silicone baby bump — which she soon “shoved in a closet,” she noted, unsure of exactly how to use it, until she met with the curator Elisabeth Sherman for coffee and began to discuss ideas around a larger body of work.

Over a year later, that work, curated by Sherman, is on view at the International Center of Photography in New York as an exploratory show around pregnancy and parenthood, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Titled “Instead, I spin fantasies,” the mix of self-portraits and portraits of friends and loved ones is often diaristic, with sunlit photos of happy, expectant couples; new parents with their children; and intimate third-trimester portraits interspersed with scenes of Green navigating an imagined pregnancy. In the show, Green assembles a wide swath of photos depicting different versions of family and community, and often touches on the expected social structures and pressures of parenthood.

“What, to me, feels very critical of this work is that I’m not trying to point to the solution, or say, ‘here is how it’s done,’” she explained. “I’m trying to explore a very expansive picture across different geographies, different classes, different ideas of family, just as a way of seeing, understanding or creating different possibilities for family-making.”

Different pathways

Green is interested in non-traditional forms of family and child raising, particularly living in a city where people often seem to follow the same formula: couples who meet and start a family in the city, then move out to suburbs and start new lives, often with limited help from family and friends. Even among her queer friends, who have likeminded, expansive ideas around community and family, the proverbial village hasn’t always been there.

“I was talking to a new friend who has a toddler, and she was talking about how, even as a queer person, that the community aspect is not as fluid as she would have imagined it to be,” Green said. “There’s this idea that your nuclear family has to be able to self-sustain. But the people I’ve made a life with — my friends, my partner — I would want all of those things to extend into having a child, and to really think about it as a community effort.”

She added: “It’s not something that I want to do in isolation, and I think that is something that’s deeply American, that it can feel very isolating. And I don’t think it has to be.”

Through her self-portraits, Green hints at the different expectations of motherhood. In one shoot, she poses in vibrant faux family portraits with a fictional father, played by fellow artist DonChristian. In another, she sits in a kiddie pool, a video camera obscuring her face, musing on the monetization of motherhood, and how “intimate family moments become a part of a brand.” In other images, she toys with the taboo: a lit joint in her fingers, or nearby cigarette butts in frame.

Smith, her wife, makes occasional appearances but is a presence behind the scenes, too, setting up the shots or helping Green into the prosthetic belly. In a hotel room in Philadelphia, where Green is originally from, Smith took a high-flash portrait of Green against a wall in a rolled-up black tee-shirt, the belly’s visible seams and pale coloring breaking the fourth wall. Green said that she had trouble finding a prosthetic that matched her skin tone, adding another layer to the work by questioning “who we envision as being a mother.”

Heavy expectations

As Green developed the work further, conversations with friends stayed on her mind — people who had told her that pregnancy was the only time they felt that they could stop thinking about body image and thinness; others who followed time-intensive diets and niche advice, or shirked traditional literature on motherhood completely.

“People reach for the things that make them feel the most in control in a really kind of wild time,” she said. “And who am I to say that it’s wrong or right for that person? But culturally, we have so many opinions on what mothers and pregnant people are supposed to do and how they’re supposed to do it.”

Green says the series will continue to be ongoing. As she’s made more connections and opened up discussions in the course of making the work, she feels “a greater sense of possibility” about what community and family can be. Recently, she began making early plans with a close friend who is planning to become pregnant.

“I said to her, ‘Well, I would love to be part of those very early days with you. I could come live with you for a month, or six weeks,’ and be part of the process of someone raising a child, even though that child is not mine,” she recalled. “But to be deeply rooted in community means that we are all responsible for you and your baby’s well-being. And that felt really exciting to me, because I think that’s not often the way I hear people thinking about friendship when they bring their children home.” She added: “I’m definitely interested in a vision that invites more trusted people into the life of the child.”

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