DONOR

Add to Cart

Adding...

Checkout

AKAAKA

Photography

Hardcover

120 pages

188 x 257 mm

ISBN 9784865412208

Japanese, English

Jan 2026

In the likeness of the Virgin and Child— Portraits that question the image of “motherhood.”

The “mothers” observed by Maki Umaba are not abstract ideals or symbols—the wise mother or the merciful mother—but individual, flesh-and-blood women who live with contradiction and uncertainty.

From the Virgin and Child statues displayed in museums to memory portraits taken in photography studios, images of mothers and infants have long been presented to us as symbols of happiness. The serene Virgin with her merciful gaze, the gentle motherhood captured in softly illuminated commemorative photographs—these staged and repeatedly reproduced images of the mother and child have become unconsciously imprinted within us as idealized visions of motherhood.

In DONOR, Umaba adopts compositions that echo Western representations of the Virgin and Child, yet through portraits of women breastfeeding, she quietly casts a question toward this deeply internalized image of “motherhood” that we carry without awareness.

When the Virgin Mary received the sudden Annunciation, did she truly accept it as calmly as we imagine? In a single moment, women come to be seen as “mothers” under the expectations and gaze of society, assuming roles they are asked to embody. Far removed from a sweet and abstract world, they continue, day after day, to devote themselves to the lives before them.
What lies beyond the gaze of those who give themselves to this task without spectacle or proclamation?

Between the photographic pages appear the women’s own words—expressing hesitation, bodily experience, and private reflections. As the image of “mother” precedes the individual, the portraits, photographed within each woman’s domestic interior, illuminate the intertwined realities of their lives: confusion and anger, exhaustion and absurdity, love and anxiety, all complexly interwoven within real women’s existence.

Wife, mother, daughter, friend, neighbor— and beyond these roles emerges the quiet realization that one is oneself. These portraits reveal the dignity of that realization.

Maki Umaba

Born in Tokyo, Maki Umaba started photography while studying oil painting at an art university. After working in the photography department of one of the leading newspaper companies, she was selected for the Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists organized by the Agency for Cultural Affairs and studied at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, France. She worked as a darkroom printer for the photographer Lucien Clergue and printed a large number of his black-and-white silver gelatin photographs.Since returning to Japan, she has been working as a freelance photographer for magazines and advertising campaigns. She also works as a part-time lecturer at Bunka Gakuen University and at Nippon Photography Institute.

She has received several notable awards, including the Semi-Grand Prize at the 33rd Taiyo Award in 1996, as well as an Honorable Mention at the 5th Canon New Cosmos of Photography Award in the same year.

Her publications include ABSENCE (Sokyusha, 2008), followed by We are here (Akaaka, 2016). In 2022, she self-published Maboroshi, featuring a poem by Shuntaro Tanikawa.

AKAAKA