Alae (In the Mirror), Beirut, Lebanon, 2020 © Rania Matar
Mark Alice Durant speaks with renowned photographer Rania Matar about her new photography book published by Radius Books.
Rania Matar is a Lebanese-born photographer whose portraits, primarily of girls and women, in the Middle East and the U.S., have gained critical and popular attention internationally. Her fourth book, She, is being published by Radius Books this fall, for which I was honored to contribute an essay. I first saw Matar’s photographs in a solo exhibition in 2016, titled Invisible Children, that presented portraits of refugee children on the streets of Beirut. I was struck by the simplicity and clarity of her imagery, yet also moved by the complex political subtext.
The history of photography is shaped by portraiture. It is the most rudimentary of photographic relationships––one person points a camera at another. From that simple arrangement has grown an enormous archive of formal and informal images, providing a sense of who we are, individually and collectively. What distinguishes a complex portrait from a photo made for a passport? What elevates mere likeness into an image that resonates?
Like many great portraitists before her, from August Sander to Seydou Keita, Matar, first and foremost, respects and honors her subjects. And in doing so, Matar has expanded the spectrum of human representation. She describes her portrait sessions as collaborations; that collaborative spirit, combined with her intuitive sense of light and sensitivity to the architectural and cultural space that surrounds us, has produced an extraordinary body of work. Matar’s solo exhibition, which shares its title with the book opens October 23rd at Robert Klein Gallery.
Mark Alice Durant in conversation with Rania Matar
Wafaa and Sanaa, Bourj El Barajneh Refugee Camp, Beirut, Lebanon, 2017 © Rania Matar
Mark Alice Durant: You have talked about your residency at Kenyon College a couple of years ago in terms of how it changed your image making. You continued to do portraiture of course, but that your images became more environmental. What happened or what did you observe that signaled that change for you?
Matar: Many of my images were already environmental but they were mainly within the domestic and familial space – like my project A Girl in her Room. At Kenyon College, where I was a visiting artist, I was thrown into an environment I was not familiar with and I completely fell in love with the rural Ohio landscape. I was also collaborating there with a psychology professor and I got to interact closely with many students. Earlier that year and due to personal issues I had been under a lot of stress, which caused me to lose almost half my hair. It was traumatizing and it made me very aware of our individual texture and physicality. It also made me attentive to the hair but also to the general physicality and personal texture of the young women I collaborated with at Kenyon College especially in conjunction of the beautiful texture of the landscape that I was falling in love with.
My own daughters were growing up and leaving home, and in photographing these young Kenyon women outside their own homes and contexts and in the more global environments they were finding themselves in, I was in some way reflecting what was going on in my own life and my daughters’ lives. All of my work is somewhat autobiographical and follows my daughters (and myself) through the stages of life and of growing up. This work was no exception.
A few months later when I went to Lebanon to visit my dad, I continued this newly developing project there. In Lebanon, the textures of the walls, of the earth, and the light, are so different – there is a tactility of history, an urgency, the left-over scars of the Lebanese Civil War and more, and I wanted to portray the women in that environment.
I was grateful to be honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship with this work. Whereas it all started in Ohio, the Fellowship allowed me the time and resources to travel to different areas of the United States and of the Middle East, and to collaborate with young women I would have never had the opportunity to meet. For me it is all about the shared humanity of growing up as a girl and a woman.
Kefa, Gambier, Ohio, 2018 © Rania Matar
Durant: For me there is something undeniably epic in many of your photographs. I’m sure you don’t approach your subject thinking “How do I make this epic? Or, maybe you do.” (Laughter). What I am trying to say that while these are not informal photographs, there is a ‘meta’ quality that elevates the image beyond a portrait of a single individual. Is there a political or philosophical subtext to your approach?
Matar: Thank you for saying that and for seeing this in the work! I actually work instinctively and organically. Part of my training is in architecture so I am very aware of the space and the relationship between people and the space they occupy. I go to the photo session with a blank slate and work with the person and the environment in front of me. We collaborate, and I have to give credit to the women I am photographing because we are creating the image together. So it’s not just my doing; I try to give time to the process so that it can unfold naturally, and I want each woman to feel that she has agency and is part of that process.
Gawhara, Cairo, Egypt, 2019 © Rania Matar
Durant: Many of your images have a cinematic quality. Sometimes that translates into that epic or meta quality, sometimes it is suggested by the feeling that the photograph is a slice from a larger narrative. I am thinking of a particular image here, of Gawhara, in Cairo. She is in a simple-patterned dress and she is coming out from behind a carved wooden door on what I assume is a Cairo street. The intricate carving on the door is echoed by the pattern on Gawhara’s dress. The photograph seems to capture an in-between moment, as if something has just happened or is about to happen. She is not looking at you, or the lens of the camera, she is looking past you, maybe down the street, suggesting an interiority that we cannot access.
Matar: That was my first time in Cairo. I had a wonderful man, a young photographer himself, (what people might call a “fixer”) helping me and taking me around. As a woman alone there for the first time there, I would have had no idea where to start. The city is a treasure. He was immensely helpful. He had friends and contacts and he introduced me to many of the young women who I collaborated with. That is how I met Gawhara. This photo is one of the few where I had to go back and re-shoot, I hardly ever do that. Lebanese people are notoriously late for appointments but in Cairo they take it to another level (Laughter.)
I was supposed to meet her in the late afternoon but she was at least an hour late so there was very little daylight left. We were walking through the neighborhood and I saw that door and how it echoed the pattern and color of her dress, but it was getting dark. We made a few pictures but it was tough to work with the available light. I only use available light so I begged her to return in the morning so that we could make it work as I could tell that the whole situation: the woman, her attitude the setting, all of it was perfect.
There was something cinematic about her, about how she carried herself. She was a smoker and the frames in which she is holding a cigarette really look cinematic. I ultimately asked her to drop the cigarette but thankfully the attitude and the mood all remained without the cigarette. I hesitated on what frame to select during the editing process and I preferred the more ambiguous one where all the elements were there but without on the cigarette.
Jana (Behind the Window), La Maison Rose, Beirut, Lebanon, 2019 © Rania Matar
Durant: You are from Beirut, capital of Lebanon, a country that has been, to some extent, in crisis for fifty years. You have family there; your dad still lives there. Beirut used to be called ‘The Paris of the Middle East,’ and it was famous for its elegance and internationalism. I know that you were not an artist when you lived in Beirut; you left to study architecture. But are there ways in which growing up in that environment still continues to affect you as an artist?
Matar: Beirut and all the crises you refer to completely define who I am. I grew up during the Lebanese Civil War, I was studying architecture at the American University in Beirut before I transferred to Cornell in upstate New York. Things got really bad in 1984 and many young people left then (sadly this is what is happening now again). Being from Lebanon has shaped me in so many ways I don’t know where to start. I left Lebanon at the age of the women I am photographing now. At that age, life is in transition, you don’t know who you are going to be.
As a result, it is always very intense and emotional to photograph there, now more than ever because the country is in utter collapse. I am looking at these young women, who are the age of my daughters, and the age that I was when I was so torn about whether to leave my country or not. In some ways, the pictures are self-portraits. Many of these women are facing the same dilemma thirty-seven years later, which is heartbreaking.
While I identify as Lebanese, my father is Palestinian, which only heightens the sense of ongoing crisis. But it wasn’t until after September 11, 2001, and the rhetoric at that moment in the United States of “us vs. them” that I became interested in presenting a different narrative of the Middle East. I was “them” and “us”. I was an American citizen by then but I also became more acutely aware of my Lebanese and Palestinian heritage.
There seemed to be a deep divide and misunderstanding of the area as a whole, often looking at people, especially women in a one-dimensional manner. For instance the obsession with the headscarf (the veil) and the rhetoric that women in the Middle East are oppressed and need saving, were getting tiresome.
That being said, when I collaborating with a woman, I am not thinking of all of that. I am fully focused on her – she is the most important person in the world to me in that moment. I am not thinking about politics or much else beyond how to create something unique, personal, beautiful and powerful with that person. I don’t take it for granted that those women have agreed to be photographed and I never want my work to seem exploitative or opportunistic. I strive to make the process fun, empowering and fully collaborative.
I have photographed Samira, a third generation Palestinian refugee, since she was five years old; she has always lived in a refugee camp. The world doesn’t care, but I adore her and I want people to see her for who she is, and give her a voice.
Samira, Beirut, Lebanon, 2019 © Rania Matar
Durant: You always work with natural light, yet sometimes I think you must control the sun! (Laughter). It is as if when you release the shutter, it is ‘the’ moment, not in the Cartier-Bresson sense of the decisive moment, but when the light is perfect. Even when it is diffused light it always seems to be the gentlest of light. I remember hearing a story about the film director Stanley Kubrick who while working on Barry Lyndon, which he shot in available light, would set up a scene and then just watch and wait for the light to be right. Is that you?
Matar: I am very aware of light, of course. And I am particularly in love with the light in Lebanon. I usually shoot in the early morning or late afternoon when the light is best but also because I have to juggle with many family responsibilities while I am there, and my days tend to be full, so I cherish my time photographing.
I am an American now; I got married here and raised my children here. But there is a sense of urgency, particularly in Lebanon, which heightens my awareness of the fleeting quality of light, of the precious moments, of the situation, of the country and the individual stories that the young women bring to the shoot. I am striving to find the beauty there, in spite of the more obvious difficulties. Beirut is strewn with destroyed buildings: some that were abandoned and never rebuilt after the Civil War, others more recent after miscellaneous incidents and then most recently after the August 4, 2020 Port Explosions.
But at the same time there is so much beauty: the country itself, the setting, the Mediterranean, the beautiful mountains, the warmth of the people and the incredibly talented beautiful young generation, who I hope will save the country.
Rachel, Marlborough Connecticut, 2018 © Rania Matar
Rayven, Miami Beach, Florida, 2019 © Rania Matar
Durant: Your book that is just coming out now with Radius, was delayed quite a bit, mostly because of the domino effect of Covid-19. This allowed you to include some photographs that you made in 2020 and even from 2021. Why was that important to you?
Matar: A lot happened in that year that changed me and changed the women I am photographing, and not just because of Covid-19. On August 4, 2020, there were horrific explosions at the Port of Beirut – that I referred to earlier. I went back to Lebanon thinking I wanted to document the destruction. But once I was there I realized that I had no interest in that but instead I wanted to focus on the strength, resilience, and dignity of the young women in that distressed environment.
I found hope and inspiration through them. Instead of focusing on destruction, I found myself in awe of them, their creativity, strength, beauty, and resilience, despite all, and felt a sense of urgency in collaborating with them, giving them a voice, and the opportunity and power to express themselves. They each had a story. We were creating the stage together to tell those story – her individual story and our collective story. I am delighted that some of those images were made just on time to be in the book. They would not have made it, had the book been published on time – a small silver lining of Covid-19 related delays.
Mark Alice Durant is an artist and writer based in Baltimore. He is author of 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography, and the founder and publisher of Saint Lucy Books.