A wide-ranging series of portraits of women from Lebanon, visually telling their story and their relationship with the country, 50 years after the beginning of the civil war.
2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War, and Lebanon still suffers from its consequences. In this book, Rania Matar collaborate with women to visually tell their story and their relationship to this beautiful and broken country. She sees her younger self in these women as she herself was 20 when she left Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. The process is collaborative, and the photo session always evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment, and making it their own. In her words: "While my photographs may not provide solutions or closure, I hope they nevertheless invite the viewer to pause and find the beauty, the hope, the shared humanity, and the grace that still exist despite everything. They are my love letters to the woen of Lebanon. This project is for us all: the ones who stayed and the ones who left but can never leave."
As a Lebanese-born Palestinian-American artist and mother, Rania Matar's crosscultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Her work has been widely exhibited in—and collected by—museums worldwide including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others. She had solo exhibitions at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, American University of Beirut Museum, Huntsville Museum of Art, Middlebury Museum of Art, and more.
