93.47 x 111.76 cm
a selection of photographs by Boston-based photographer Rania Matar in SHE, a series of portraits depicting women and womanhood across cultural boundaries.
The women photographed in SHE contain multitudes: They’re playful but self-assured; soft yet strong; curious and adventurous. From Massachusetts to Beirut, Matar collaborates with these women to create images that reflect their experience leaving home and entering adulthood.
Matar’s work is inextricably linked to who she is as a mother, a Lebanese-American, and a woman. The artist photographs women across the Middle East and the United States, depicting the universality of the experience of womanhood. Inspired by her daughters, Matar focuses her lens on women who are the same age as them. In previous series, she’s captured pre-teen girls as they develop their sense of selfhood and teenage girls in bedrooms filled to the brim with art, makeup, and clothes. Now, she’s onto SHE, an exploration of early adulthood.
“Whereas in earlier projects, I photographed young women in relationship to the curated and controlled environment of their bedrooms,” says Matar, “I am photographing them in the larger environment they find themselves in after they leave home, the more global and complicated backdrop that now constitutes their lives in transitions.”
We sat down with Matar to ask her a couple of questions about how these works came to be and what her process looks like.
RKG: How did Covid-19 impact your work, if at all?
RM: It is interesting because there’s Covid-19, but for me as a Lebanese-American, there was also the explosion at the Port of Beirut last year that definitely impacted my work. With Covid-19, I was anxious to see people, but my first shoot in-person was such a treat. My work is so much about physicality and texture and really being present, so not having had that for so long it was really a treat to start photographing with people again last summer.
But secondly, there were the explosions at the Port. My son moved to Lebanon afterwards and started volunteering, so I went with him to set up and photograph the destruction. I realized when I got there that I had zero interest in photographing the destruction. What I found beautiful was that there was still beauty despite everything that had happened, and there was this younger generation sweeping the glass off the floor. I felt like they were majestic in a way—they were still hoping for a new government, and there was this feeling that something would emerge from the destruction. That hope is diminishing now, but it was so much there.
RKG: What does your process for a shoot look like?
RM: I make the process very collaborative. I want all of the women to have complete agency during the session that we share together, so I go into every shoot with a completely open slate. I don’t know what I’m doing—it’s something we discover and build together.
