In the dimly lit corners of Naima Green’s studio, she carefully mixes an albumen mixture—a process from the 1850s that primarily uses egg whites to coat paper—breathing life into the glossy surfaces of her pregnancy photographs. The process is intimate, labor-intensive, and enacted through her hands. The egg, no different than the fertile bodies Green portrays in her portraits, is a perpetual liminal space–where creation is at the precipice, but never realized, instead yielding a whole other thing. Green uses the egg white, that goey, liquidy protective sac that encases the life-full yolk, to coat the paper. With each coating of the paper, the surface becomes glossier, protecting the image Green has created. 

Green stages intimate self-portraits, often wearing prosthetic bellies, and photographs pregnant friends in a gesture that acknowledges the fragility and power of the maternal body. Green has long been captivated by water as both an elemental and conceptual force–both vulnerable and strong, just like the maternal body.

Through staged portraiture, she constructs images that oscillate between the tangible and the imagined, unraveling the narratives we inherit about motherhood. Her work probes the politics of pregnancy, asking who is granted the privilege of safe childbirth and maternal agency, and who is denied.

In these images, Green explores the layers of personal and societal narratives that shape the experience of the maternal body. These staged photographs exist in a space between the personal and the public, inviting the viewer to contemplate societal expectations surrounding motherhood and the often-unspoken tensions embedded in the reproductive body.

Each photograph, coated in egg-whites, becomes an extension of the bodily water that Green seeks to understand. Through her lens, she investigates the ways bodies interact with both natural and constructed environments, particularly water as a vessel of life, sustenance, and tension. 

In her broader practice, Green’s work challenges notions of intimacy, care, and resource scarcity, particularly through her engagement with the themes of pregnancy and childbearing in an era marked by climate crises and systemic inequality. Double exposures and sequential imagery imbue her compositions with a sense of motion—bodies caught in the act of becoming. In this, she aligns with artists like Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, who use photography as a tool to complicate identity and representation.

As she shifts from photographing others to depicting her own body in stages of staged pregnancy, Green gives form to the unspoken realities of gender, race, and power—making visible the complex layers of identity, responsibility, and desire that so often go unacknowledged. Water flows through her work not as a singular idea but as a multiplicity of truths, a catalyst for thought, movement, and change.

At a moment when reproductive rights hang in the balance, Green’s work is both timely and timeless. Pregnancy, in her hands, is neither purely biological nor wholly symbolic—it is a contested space, a site of resistance, a vessel of histories both personal and collective.