Both visually stunning and culturally captivating, A Girl and Her Room offers a rare vista into one piece of what it means to grow up as a girl and to metamorphose into a woman, with all her obsessions, convictions, and fascinations, prompting us to find the parallels and universals amidst the differences and contrasts.

Maria Popova, Editor of Brain Pickings; writer for Wired UK and The Atlantic

“Rania Matar’s series, A Girl and Her Room, is a powerful statement about the persistence of Western ideals of beauty and the proliferation of media images and commercial products directed at young women and their insecurities – “Am I beautiful?” “Am I loved?” “Who are my friends?” “Who are my role models?” Matar’s complex social portrait of female adolescence, an unusually intimate collaboration between photographer (herself a mother of teenage girls) and subject, is also a revealing documentary of place – the teenager’s bedroom as a sanctuary of self-creation and experimentation. Rooms are filled with the detritus of daily life (from make-up and shoes, to stuffed animals and celebrity posters) which function as constant, albeit often conflicting, identity markers. For all their apparent self-absorption and vulnerability, Matar’s subjects exhibit a desire to be seen and willfully engage in a presentation of self before Matar and her camera.”

Susan L. Stoops, Curator of Contemporary Art, Worcester Art Museum

Rania Matar’s portraits of girls in their rooms are collaborations–in the truest sense of the word–involving the artist and her teenage subjects, many of whom she did not know before she undertook this project. Allowed to pose themselves and surrounded by their most intimate possessions, the girls in her pictures, like so many adolescents today, seem caught in that precarious balance between pensive and insecure, on the one hand, and mature beyond their years, on the other. With an artist’s unerring eye and a mother’s sixth sense, Matar captures the horror vacui of these private spaces in all their glorious color and intricate detail, somehow making us feel like privileged insiders who have inexplicably been invited past the “Do Not Enter” sign on the door!

Karen Haas, Curator of Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“The girls are there, alone with the photographer, exposing themselves to our eyes. They not only expose their face, their skin, their tattoos, they expose their universes. Every picture reveals a girl in her sanctuary: We see a lot, we know nothing; every Girl and her Room remains a mystery, a vulnerable object of intrigue.”

Gregory Buchakjian, Art Historian, Beirut

An added strength of Matar’s project is her blend of pictures from two cultures: US and Middle East, establishing revelations in both the similarities and the divergences in each culture’s bedrooms. Matar’s understanding of the rich possibilities in this dichotomy grew slowly. Before conceiving “a girl and her room” as a series, Matar started photographing her daughters and their friends, working with relationships that existed before she took their portraits. This placed her in a long and fertile tradition of women photographers who have photographed their children, ranging from Julia Margaret Cameron in nineteenth-century England to the California photographer Imogen Cunningham in the twenties to the contemporary photographer Sally Mann, just to name a few. These women’s pictures were radically different in style and content, but basically, they were young mothers using the material most at hand. Matar’s project took shape and moved away from this tradition when she developed the duality of photographing the girls and their rooms, giving each equal weight. Soon, she began to seek out girls of increasingly different backgrounds, first in the US and then in the Middle East, and challenged herself to develop with strangers the same collaborative spirit first achieved with her daughters and their friends.

However cautious one should be in speculating about the lives of strangers, it is human to do so, and it is just as human for her potential subjects to want to avoid such conjectures. But something in the way that Matar approached her subjects allayed their fears, and those of their parents. Maybe it was that she always refers to them as young women, not girls, and assumed that their selves as expressed in their rooms were important and worthy of serious consideration. Rather than portray the stereo-typed “crazy teens with raging hormones,” she approached each person with respect and kindness, looking for individuality and accepting with grace the forms it took.

Anne Tucker, Curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

A Girl and Her Room was featured in the April 2012 “Girl” issue of Brooklyn’s Working Class Magazine. The issue focuses on what it means to be a girl, the modern girl’s life, and features the lives and work of some amazing Brooklyn-based girls. Below is an excerpt of the review by Ryan Michael Commins.

“There are no photographs in which the girl doesn’t seem to perfectly fit in the room. They must work together because these are two symbiotic beings living in coexistence. As the girl evolves, so goes the room. A Girl and Her Room is a candid vivisection of that process in book form.”

Ryan Michael Commins

“To carry us beyond the hype and headlines of the news of the day, Rania Matar’s photography brings us insight into the lives and hearts of her people. The faith and commitment to life that mark the crossroads of modern Lebanon have shaped her soul and inspired her eye. This is art touched by a grace that commands our attention and makes demands upon our understanding and compassion. A clear light such as hers will always illuminate the spirit of humankind and aid us all in our daily challenge of beating back the lurking darkness.”

Roy Flukinger, Senior Research Curator, Harry Ransom Center Austin TX

In the world of stark contrasts that is Lebanon today Rania Matar documents the precarious existence of women and girls as they navigate their everyday lives in the aftermath of civil war. Her stunning black-and-white images made in the Palestinian refugee camps stand as witness to the strength and spirit of those seeking normalcy in the ruins of this war torn country. Matar approaches her veiled subjects, both young and old, with a rare intimacy and respect born of her own profound compassion for her native Lebanon and its people.

Karen Haas, The Lane Collection Curator of Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A sense of duality informs Matar’s work. Much of that duality is what one might expect: East and West, rich and poor, war and peace. But what’s most striking about Matar’s photography is another duality: its balance between the realistic and poetic. She is the documentarian as lyricist, someone who, recording the incongruous, discovers the transcendent.

Mark Feeney, Boston Globe

Rania Matar photographs the ordinary activity of life – women reading a newspaper, young women putting on a veil, children playing with dolls, clothes drying on a line – in a culture often misunderstood in the West, at a time of social and political conflict. Her photographs do not explore the conflicting ideologies. They are studies of the beauty and resiliency of the human spirit made by a gifted photographer who combines the knowledge and love of the land of her birth with the perspective of a person educated in the West. Ordinary Lives is anything but ordinary.

Howard Bossen, PhD, Professor, School of Journalism, Michigan State University
Adjunct Photography Curator, Kresge Art Museum

Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon. She was trained and worked as an architect from 1987 to 2000, but in the summer of 2002 she began photographing the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. She has returned each summer to capture the humanity of those who have lost everything, but still maintain their dignity. Her work expanded over time to include the aftermath of war and women and the veil, giving a face to people often forgotten or misunderstood.

Drawn to the most difficult of subject matter, Matar has managed to be present, but not seen, to record small moments in the ordinary lives of people living under extraordinary circumstances. The individuals in her pictures, mostly women and children, are treated with respect and sensitivity.

Matar’s pictures are direct, honest, and without pretense. They are not political. They transcend time and place and provide comfort and warmth. In spite of the context of war and displacement, they have a beauty of their own and give us hope for a better world.

Constantine Manos, Photographer, Magnum Photos