A Girl and Her Room

Born and raised in Lebanon, Rania Matar moved to the United States in 1984. Her work focuses on creating awareness and a dialogue between the two cultures, with an emphasis on identity and universality. Matar’s work has been widely published and exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide, and her images are in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions, and private collections. She has published three books: L’enfant-femme (2016), A Girl and Her Room (2012), and Ordinary Lives (2009).

Matar received several grants and awards including a 2017 Mellon residency at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, a 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships in 2007 and 2011, and first-place prizes at the New England Photographers Biennial and Women in Photography International. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition. A midcareer retrospective of her work will be exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in a solo exhibition, In Her Image; her work will also be exhibited at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris from September 12 to November 13, 2017, as part of the Biennale des Photographes du Monde Arabe Contemporain.

A Girl and Her Room

This body of work was inspired by my daughter when she was fifteen. As I watched her passage from girlhood into adulthood, I was fascinated by the transformation taking place, the adult personality taking shape and a gradual self-consciousness replacing the carefree world she had known and lived in so far. I started photographing her with her girlfriends and quickly realized how aware they were of each other’s presence and how much the group affected the identity they were portraying to the world. From this recognition the idea of photographing each girl by herself emerged.

The room was a metaphor, an extension of the girl, but also the girl seemed to be part of the room, to fit in just like everything else in the material and emotional space.

I initially started this work focusing on teenage girls in the United States and eventually expanded the project to include girls from the two worlds I am most familiar with, the worlds I experienced myself as a young woman: the United States and the Middle East. This is how this project became personal to me: I had been one of those young women twenty-five years earlier, in a different country and culture and at a different time. I became fascinated with the universality of growing up, with the similar issues girls at that age face, regardless of culture, religion, or background.