In her latest exhibition, Instead, I spin fantasies, on display at the International Center of Photography through January 12, 2026, Naima Green invites viewers into a world that reimagines the experience of pregnancy through photography and performance. Curated by Elisabeth Sherman, the show challenges visual and social expectations around motherhood, asking what it means to desire, resist, or redefine this state of being.
The exhibition unfolds through a series of constructed self-portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Green’s images neither romanticize nor reject pregnancy; instead, they consider it as both a personal and societal identity. Each frame becomes a fragment of a life that could be. “Do I want this for me,” Green asks, “or is this kind of an expectation that’s even just non-verbally been put on me around having children, being pregnant, being a birthing person?” Her questioning of these narratives forms the heart of this body of work.
For Green, the project began with curiosity. Watching friends navigate fertility and expectation, she found herself asking not only if she wanted to become a parent, but why that question felt inevitable. “I think I was also seeing a lot of friends going through this, and how much pressure people put on themselves around what their body can or cannot do,” she says. “And as soon as I got married, people would immediately ask, ‘Are you going to have babies?’ I wanted to question that automation of life—the idea that the next step must be children.”
Visually, Instead, I spin fantasies evokes this restlessness through experimentation. Green uses historical photographic methods—albumen and lumen printing—to produce soft, tactile images. The choice carries symbolic weight: albumen prints require egg whites to coat the paper, a process she connects to reproduction itself. “I love the idea of using eggs to coat the paper—making this work about pregnancy, making this work about staging,” she says. The resulting images, bathed in amber and violet tones, radiate a beauty that seems to exist between the living and the imagined.
In addition to her prints, the artist created a site-specific vinyl installation that interacts with ICP’s architecture, expanding her ideas beyond the frame and into space itself. Her characters are often versions of herself or friends, and defy traditional portrayals of pregnancy. Some sit in silence or solitude; others smoke or sip wine, acts often deemed “unacceptable” for expectant bodies. “I’m more interested in the way that pregnant bodies are policed,” Green explains. “I wanted to present these things in ways that probe our own reactions. Do you immediately think, ‘This is an irresponsible mother’? Or can you see her humanity first?”
Such moments push against sanitized depictions of motherhood: those that are white, heteronormative, and middle-class. Even the props used in her process reveal bias. “When I bought the prosthetic belly, there were no prosthetics other than white flesh,” she recalls. “It might seem small, but that’s significant—it’s another way of saying who gets to be pictured as a mother.”
Despite its weighty themes, Instead, I spin fantasies never feels preachy. Humor, tenderness, and possibility flow through the work. Green’s photographs capture not just the heaviness of choice, but the joy of imagining different lives. Her title, borrowed from Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, underscores that sense of exploration. “It felt really important to talk about the idea of fantasy,” she says. “I love to play and picture these possibilities without having to fully live them.”
Through this act of imagining, Green reframes pregnancy as a metaphor, and a space where desire, doubt, and autonomy coexist. Her lens resists finality; every image feels open-ended, as if the story could turn in any direction. The result is a body of work that questions what it means to make life, but also to live one’s own on one’s own terms.