A Love Letter to Lebanon
Rania Matar's Where Do I Go?
In one of the first photographs in Rania Matar’s new book Where Do I Go? (KAPH Books and the Eskenazi Museum of Art), a young woman gazes into a mirror in a room that has seen better days [Rhea (and the Mirror), Beirut, Lebanon, 2021]. She looks into the mirror, but her reflection looks directly at us, the viewers. Her gaze is unsmiling, challenging even. Where, indeed, can she go, as a citizen of a country repeatedly afflicted by war and violence? Like two of Matar’s previous series, She and A Girl and Her Room, these new portraits focus on women, but while those series moved back and forth between Lebanon and the US – a reflection of Matar’s own dual identity – the portraits in Where Do I Go? were all made in Lebanon. Matar’s photographs are straightforward, in some ways, but they contain layers of meaning and context, and the country and its history are as much her subjects as the individual women. In these collaborative photographs, each woman chose the place where she wanted to be photographed. Even prior to the latest wave of violence, it’s clear they wanted viewers to see the impact on their homeland of decades of destruction. One woman stands barefoot on a pile of rubble, underneath a jagged hole in the ceiling; cables hang down, uselessly, some with chunks of concrete clinging to them. Some women are covered, most are not; occasionally the women wear nothing at all. Matar’s subjects are mostly young, but otherwise they are a varied group, a rejection of the flattening assumptions often projected onto women from the Middle East.
The “tactility of history,” as Matar has described it, is impossible to ignore in Lebanon. There are massive windows whose panes are broken, ornate architectural elements that are rusted or peeling, a once-elegant interior that’s been overtaken by dried leaves and bare branches. The women, often barefoot and wearing flowing, colorful dresses, provide a poignant contrast to the terrain in which they’re photographed. They appear self-possessed, resilient; their portraits seem to insist that beauty and self-expression are essential, individually and culturally, despite accumulated, and ongoing, destruction. The series was prompted by the Port of Beirut explosion in 2020, which killed more than 200 people, and it grew into a long-term project that coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War; it has been published in the midst of this latest war, in which more than a million people have reportedly been displaced.
Matar herself left Lebanon in 1984, when she was 20, the age of many of the young women in her photographs, to continue her studies in architecture. A question, an unresolved decision, runs throughout these portraits. For those who are able, when – if ever – is it time to leave your home? In Tara (in the Flowers), Bekaatat Kanaan, Lebanon, 2022, a young woman in a green floral dress sinks back into an expanse of soft green and white flowers, eyes closed, arms wide. An apple tree heavy with fruit spreads out behind her. She seems to be part of the land, a land that holds her gently and provides for her. How unthinkable to leave such a place; what an impossible decision to confront. In Mariam (Swing Set), Ramlet Al-Bayda, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021, a woman looking out to sea holds onto the chains of a swing on a once-ornate swingset on a beach, a beautifully framed and composed image that also calls evokes the beautiful ruins of a lost childhood and raises heartbreaking questions about what kind of future the country holds for the next generation.
History is everywhere. In Aya (Dancing), Beirut, Lebanon, 2022 (wall art by Nabil Assaf), a woman in a long white dress faces a wall with a depiction of two couples dancing. The mural has the look of an old black-and-white photograph. This is not a formal dance – the couples are casually dressed, smiling, maybe from an earlier time, some previous decades. Like an old family photograph found in an album, it preserves a memory of happier times. Matar has also included some 20 images, in the back of the book, from the archives of the Lebanese journalist and historian Georges Boustany, who has collected vernacular photographs and newspaper clippings since the time of the civil war . Family photographs, commemorating outings and celebrations as well as evidence of war and destruction, a continuity of struggle and resilience in the face of conflict.
Matar, like Rineke Dijkstra or Judith Joy Ross, is a sensitive and curious portraitist, especially of women and girls. She’s also a cinematic photographer who imbues her images with dramatic tension. Beautifully composed, made with an awareness of architectural space and light, her pictures nonetheless remind us that the destruction playing out on a global scale has life-altering consequences for these young women on the cusp of adulthood. A quiet, haunting photograph of a dim grey room with a broken door opening onto a light-filled tangle of green leaves alludes to the ambiguity, the uncertainty, of what lies beyond, like the surreal and unpredictable doorways through which Mohsin Hamid’s increasingly desperate protagonists pass in Exit West, when their lives are upended by war.
Matar’s photographs are on view at the Eskenazi Museum of Art through August 2; in Leica Gallery Boston through May 31; and at Robert Klein Gallery in Boston from May 9 through September 19.
Rania Matar’s work has always been so meaningful to me, and you have illuminated it beautifully Jean!
Thank you for this beautiful piece and for sharing Matar’s gorgeous portraits. It made me think that we can never leave home behind whether we leave by choice or by force.