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

PostedOctober 18, 2021

AuthorMark Alice Durant

Categoriesinterviews, Artists, Exhibitions, Photobooks

TagsRania Matar, Mark Alice Durant, Lebanese photographers, women photograph, portraits of women, photography and the middle east, photography and adolescence, Radius Books, 2021 photobooks, new photography, documentary photography, contemporary photographic portraiture

J.B. about men floating in the ait, 2015 © Julia Borissova — *J.B. about men floating in the ait, 2015* © Julia Borissova

Mark Alice Durant’s latest book, Running, Falling, Flying, Floating, Crawling, published by his imprint Saint Lucy Books aggregates more than 50 contemporary, historical and vernacular photographers who use representations of the body as symbols of uncertainty, distress, humor, and dissonance. In Tabitha Soren's Dave, it’s terror – a man runs across a New York City street looking up in fear. For those who were alive at the time, we might conjure 9/11 imagery. A nation at war in constant panic.

In William Lamson’s Sublunar No. 23, it’s fun, conceptual, and performative. A group of white-suited maybe-astronauts, maybe-daredevils bounce a helmeted body off a makeshift trampoline into a deep black sky beckoning viewers to maybe laugh, maybe smile, and maybe scratch our heads. In Rania Matar’s Alae, Khiyam Lebanon, a Lebanese Muslim woman sits in a stream, almost cradling it, almost sleeping.
Yet it's clear she is collaborating with the photographer to convey calm and vulnerability.

Durant invited some of photography's most prominent curators, poets, and critics to respond to these images and offer context and meaning apart from the series to which they belong. It’s a book you’ll want to sit with for a while, one that will continue to evolve as we understand these images as stand-ins for an increasingly confusing and uncertain world.

I spoke with Durant to learn more about his thinking on this thoughtfully existential project.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Mark Alice Durant

PostedJanuary 28, 2021

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesPhotobooks, Artists

Tags2021 Photobooks, Mark Alice Durant, Saint Lucy Books, vernacular photography, running falling flying floating crawling book

Photo © Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

In 2007, photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman began Geolocation, a nationwide project, tracking the locations of hundreds of tweets from around the United States, Canada and the UK and making photographs to mark their location in the real world. Working long distance, the photographers' collaborative process explores the massive, rapid collection of often incredibly personal data, grounding it in physical form. The images, ranging from roadside slices of America not unlike Sternfeld's America Prospects, to lonely, unspecific landscapes, give a heartbreaking window into contemporary isolation and the need to connect in a time in which everyone is at our fingertips. The culmination of their work was recently pared down to a wonderful publication of more than 70 photos published by Jennifer Schwartz and David Bram's Flash Powder Projects, and includes essays by Julia Dolan, Kate Palmer Albers, Jamie Allen, Chad Alligood, Mark Alice Durant, Paul Soulellis, Michael Wolf and Natalie Zelt. We spent some time (virtually, of course) with Marni and Nate over email to learn more about their work and its implications.

She: Rania Matar's Portraits of American and Middle Eastern Young Women Entering Adulthood

A New Photobook Ponders the Human Body from Helplessness to Transcendence

Geolocation: Two Photographers' Heartbreaking Visualization of Tweets