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