Rania Matar is an award winning Lebanese born-American/Palestinian photographer and mother who has decided to chronicle what female adolescence and womanhood looks like at the parts of the world that have made up her background. To highlight similarities between all of these different experiences, she has titled the series, SHE. “I want to portray the raw beauty of their age, their individuality, physicality, texture and mystery. I photograph them the way I, a woman and a mother, see them: beautiful, alive, through a lens that both confronts and challenges the objectifying gaze so true to representations of femininity past,” writes Matar of the series.
Though the project was first published in 2021, it has gained renewed interest in today’s context—where Palestine, Lebanon and the United States have been inextricably linked in an armed conflict that escalated in October 2023. Here, SHE becomes a unification too, a call for peace that does so by highlighting the shared humanity of its women and girls. This is why SHE by Rania Matar is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of Gender Equality and Reduced Inequalities.
Despite the high production value that can be seen in the quality of lighting in each photograph, the women and girls appear to be at ease, fully comfortable in front of the camera. This contrasts the public’s usual perceptions of similar highly polished productions with women and girls being photographed— often found in fashion magazines. Hence, the photographs give an air of authenticity allowing viewers to immediately relate to the photographed subjects, even if they are themselves not women and girls from the Middle East or the United States.
In May 2024, Matar also had the opportunity to curate an exhibit on women photographers from the Arab World at the Middle East Institute (MEI) Washington DC. As a photographer herself, she included some of the works from SHE, creating an exhibit that portrays a nuanced picture of women and girls from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. “I feel like with the situation in the Middle East right now, it's such a bright spot to look at art and beauty and humanity and all coming from women,” said Matar in an interview with the Smithsonian Magazine.
Find out more about SHE and other pieces by Rania Matar on her website www.raniamatar.com or Instagram @raniamatar.