Untitled, 2020

“As my photography is based on shishōsetsu, the Japanese I­-novel, it is always made up out of my own, actual, experiences. I don’t decide in advance what I am going to photograph. And while I work from my private life, I hope that my work shares its power with many other people—and that it continues to positively resonate within them as part of their lives, too.”—Okabe Momo

Okabe Momo
Untitled, 2020; from the series llmatar
Pigment print
8 x 10 in.
Edition of 20
Signed and numbered by the artist

Okabe Momo (born in Tokyo, 1981) explores issues of gender, sexuality, and identity related to herself as well as her lovers and friends, whom she describes as “the outsiders of Japanese society.” As a toddler, Okabe spent four years in Paris, which left a lasting effect on her: “I suddenly went to a country where I could not understand the language at all, so I started to create my own world and gradually shut myself away in that world,” she says. “That world is still inside me, I live in it, and I photograph it.”