Rania Matar
It’s easy to spot a Rania Matar portrait, as the subjects appear proud, strong, comfortable, and engaged. Character and emotion, often poignant, bubble to the surface in her ever-expanding collections of girls, women, and roads traveled between them. Her prior career as an architect is evident in the strong composition and design of every image. As a Lebanese-born artist, her work also explores the lives and relationship to environment between the U.S. and the Middle East. So much of this is an intriguing world, far from my own, and I’m thankful for the opportunity to interact with and learn from her. Beyond the strengths of her abilities as a portrait photographer, it is these reasons behind making them that I find fascinating.
What you will find here is a photographic artist that knows how to buckle down and do the hard work that it takes to achieve notoriety for their practice. As you will read in the interview, following your path and your instincts is key to much of her success. Even during our current pandemic lockdown, Rania manages to use the time provided to further her work, while taking it down another avenue, yet still maintaining the aesthetic she has built for herself and her stunning imagery. To do all of this, while still finding time for family and the things that make life worth living, makes one stand up and take notice. All of these qualities are reflected in her photographs and person as an artist who engages with the community, and certainly for all of our benefit here, has granted me the time to learn from her efforts.
Minty, Kayla, Leyah, Layla, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from On Either Side of the Window
Bio -
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums, institutions, and private collections. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar and at the American University of Beirut Museum in An Image and Her Women.
Matar received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition.
She has published three books:
L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009.
Interview -
Michael Kirchoff: I understand that you had an earlier career in architecture, but you made a later transition into photography. What inspired such a dramatic change and have you ever looked back at incorporating the previous career with the later one in any way?
Rania Matar: Yes, I am trained as an architect and I was working as an architect for many years after college. I took many art classes during my architecture studies, but they were mainly painting, intaglio, and charcoal drawing. Even when I was working as an architect, I was still taking night painting classes. Eventually, I had kids and we tried to get a photographer to come over and make a holiday photo. It always turned into a fiasco trying to have them all together, so I decided to take photography workshops and do it myself. Little did I know, I fell in love with photography and ended up making pictures that were really different from what I thought I was going to be making. I fell in love with the whole craft – working in the darkroom and actually really working on the photograph, and making beautiful prints. So that was really my first introduction to my love of photography. I had 4 young children close in age, and photographing them made me see all those beautiful mundane beautiful moments of our daily life that I never actually really paid attention to, as I was busy just juggling life. But then, after September 11th, the rhetoric changed in this country – I'm from the Middle East, from Lebanon from Palestinian parents. The whole rhetoric of them versus us made me really question my whole sense of identity. I was also an American citizen. I had been living in the US since 1984, so and decided I wanted to tell a different story from the Middle East and to bridge my 2 cultures, almost as a way to come to terms with my own identity. In addition in 2002, I went to a Palestinian refugee camp, right outside of Beirut with my cousin who was making a documentary. I was shocked by the conditions people were living in and wanted to tell that story as well, so I started photographing women and children in the refugee camps. Before I knew it, I was going back and forth. Also, the reason I always mention the pictures of my kids is because those images were so intimate that they paved the way for all my photography moving forward. I was at a portfolio review and remember showing pictures of my kids, and then showing the early photos I had made at the refugee camps. The reviewer told me “you should get that same level of intimacy with everybody you photograph as with the photos of your children”. That was probably the best advice anybody ever gave me. So that early work I did with my kids was really formative for me on so many levels. And before I knew it, I wasn't doing architecture anymore and I was a photographer.
MK: So was it the advice during the portfolio review that pretty much set you on a course to developing your photography as specific bodies of work? Or was that something that you had kind of already figured out?
RM: I hadn't figured it out. I was just mainly learning, but it was that advice and that realization, that gave me the confidence to get close to people when I work with them and not to be afraid of being intimate. It's something that ended up staying with me throughout all my work. I always work with a wide-angle lens. All the work I've been making has very much to do with my role as a woman and a mother. It has been transforming as my kids have been growing up. So it started there and stayed there.
Morning Before School, Brookline 2004, from Family Moments
Spiderman, Brookline 2004, from Family Moments
MK: With every body of work, you have concentrated your photography toward women and girls, and in doing so you’ve increasingly broadened and elevated the conversations of topics like the MeToo movement, immigration, pressures of youth, and transition into adulthood. Was this always a goal, or was it gradually assessed along the way as you moved through one collection to the next?
RM: I was fascinated with watching my daughters grow up and transform through puberty, and eventually navigate the teenage years. At some point as they started getting older they didn’t let me photograph them anymore, so I started photographing other young women the same ages as my daughters. They inspire all of my work without directly being part of it. My work is somewhat autobiographical in that sense, as it still follows my daughters, as they are getting older and entering different phases of their lives as young women.
The issue of the universality of growing up from girlhood to womanhood is important to me. It is also very important to me to portray women in the US where I live and the Middle East where I am from as a way to focus on our shared humanity. I started working with women and girls before the MeToo movement and before the immigration crisis that exploded recently, because this who I am and what I am, and who and what my daughters are. I am making very personal work and I am grateful if it is resonating on a more universal level. I'm following my own life and instincts and letting the work have its own life eventually.
MK: That's interesting and a really good point in saying you follow your own instincts. I think that that's probably what everybody should always be doing.
RM: In a way, it's coming to terms with growing up and growing older and womanhood, and I always think of the quote from Diane Arbus that resonates with me so much - “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.” And I love that because I feel like I might be photographing specific young women, but in a way, all girls are going through these changes of growing up and transforming.
MK: Well then, speaking of transforming, I wanted to ask about a specific body of work that I took notice of some years ago. When I first saw images from your second book, A Girl and Her Room, I thought it interesting that if there were no people in these images, they would still be powerful portraits of each individual - what prompted this work in the first place?
RM: I had been doing my black and white work, Ordinary Lives, and felt like I couldn't add to that project anymore. The book came out and gave me closure on this body of work. I was ready to start something new, and I wanted make work in the U.S. and not just in Lebanon. So originally when I started A Girl and Her Room, I thought I was going to just be photographing in Massachusetts where I live. What prompted this work was my oldest daughter, who was about 15 then – she had been such a tomboy and her transformation into a young woman fascinated me. She was becoming different person. I decided that I wanted to start photographing teenage girls. At the beginning I wasn't sure where this was going. I started photographing her with her friends when they came over, and I realized how much they all sounded the same, as if they were performing for each other. So I decided at that point that I wanted to photograph each girl by herself. And it so happened that the first few I photographed were in the bedroom. I had like my “Aha!” moment at that point: That was my project! If I want to tell the story about each individual person, the place where she's most herself is her bedroom and what she’s surrounded herself with - where she experimented with her sense of identity. So what's on the wall and on the bed, and everywhere in the room, became important in this work. At some point I realized that 20 - 25 years earlier (in 2009, when I started this work), I was exactly like those girls – in a different country, different culture, different times, but I was just like them. There was something that resonated with me on such a deep level. I decided at that point that I wanted to include young women in the Middle East in this work as well. For me, it went full circle, tying this work to my earlier work in a way. I wanted to focus on the humanity and universality of “becoming” as a woman, so I started including teenage girls in their bedrooms in Lebanon and Palestinian refugee camps as well.
In the book and in exhibitions, I don't separate the images according to place. Even the cover of my book throws people off because people sometimes think Christilla is a young woman in the United States, but she’s actually Lebanese, and that confusion is important to me. Shattering the stereotypes of what people in the West sometimes think about women from the Middle East, often portraying them in a one-dimensional way and reducing them to the veil and oppression, became an essential aspect of my work in this body of work and beyond – without it being overtly political.
Christilla, Rabieh, Lebanon, 2010, from A Girl and Her Room
MK: Yes, certainly. Well, that's actually what leads me to my next question. Another aspect to A Girl and Her Room is the cross-cultural viewpoint you engage with. While it is clear that we would look for differences between the two, is it not also the similarities that we find going on when examining them side by side like this? Isn’t there a through-line between younger girls that is shared no matter what culture they come from?
RM: Yeah. It's interesting because on some level I want to portray the individuality of each girl. Yet, at the same time there's this universality, as you say, of growing up, of exploring, of becoming an adult, but also still being a child. And I felt like everything in the bedroom, there was always this duality. For instance one young woman had all these posters of supermodels on her wall that she was aspiring to look like, but at the same time she had all her teddy bears on the bed and her sheets were of farm animals. And I felt like this duality was present almost everywhere.
MK: That’s really interesting.
RM: When I’m photographing in a Palestinian refugee camp, the girls did not have their own bedroom, but there was always a corner of the room or the closet or something that became personalized. So that was important to show as well.
MK: Right. Speaking to identity. So I wonder since we're on the topic of girls in their room, how do your own children react to the work that you've been creating, whether it's this work or other works?
RM: Well, I have two boys and two girls. It's a good question, because somehow I was fascinated with the girls in my work. But my oldest are boy/girl twins, and the one who inspired all this work was my daughter. She got very involved in the project. I had to beg her (actually to beg both of my daughters) to be photographed for the book, because there was no way I was going to put this book out into the world, and not having them in it. But their involvement was more important is that they were fascinated by the project in general and by the girls’ bedrooms. They would often help me edit. And they would ask “which picture are you using in this exhibition? Are they using Anna, or whatever?” They started knowing the girl's names and the picture without actually knowing the person in real life. Then my younger daughter fell in love with a photograph where a young woman had all of these Post-it notes all over her room. They were a gift from her mom, where she would write one for her every day with a quote. So my daughter made me do that too, and right now my younger daughter still has them in her room - all these Post-it notes that I wrote for her every day. It was like art influencing life.
I was worried that my older son would feel left out, and I told him that I wanted to start a project involving the boys as well to which he responded: “if you ever ask any of my friends to photograph them I would never, ever speak with you ever again”. I guess he didn’t have a problem with it after all and was happy to be left alone. I did still try. I photographed four boys for this project and it just wasn't the same. There's such an intimate relationship that's being created between me and the young women. And when I tried to do that with the boys, it felt awkward. I mean, here I am, climbing on an 18 year old boys bed. It wasn't the same and I thought I should just let it be and follow my instincts with the work.
Mariam, Bourj El Shamali Refugee Camp, Tyre, Lebanon, 2009, from A Girl and Her Room
Sienna, Brokline, Massachusetts, 2009, from A Girl and Her Room
MK: Well, as subjects, I would suppose boys and men, in general, are probably a little less trusting or willing to show their feelings or emotions.
RM: I think they have a different relationship to the bedroom as well. It wasn't the right project for that.
MK: Maybe it should be their car.
RM: Yeah. Or maybe the man-cave in the basement.
MK: Exactly.
RM: So I owned it. I'm making work that is personal to me. I am a woman, I was a girl, I was one of those girls in the photographs. I still see myself in them and I relate to every one of them on a very personal level.
MK: Right. There was definitely more connection there. I wanted to kind of fast forward quite a bit to more recent days. I’ve seen that you are making great use of your time during the current pandemic. You continue to make portraits, but the difference is that they are all at a distance, behind windows, or looking through doorways. Is this a new body of work now, and do you see it continuing in the same tradition as previous works? How does it connect with previous works?
RM: You know: it's interesting because, well, I'm going to put it in a little bit of context. I had been making work, which is actually the body of work that I had received a Guggenheim for, and what I had been working on for the past three years – again young women, again the ages of my daughters, but they were a now little older. So I was photographing these young women not in the cocoon of home because they left home, but in the more global landscape they found themselves in as they transitioned into their new lives. I was interested in how they blended into that landscape, how they made it their own, and presided over it.
I was editing this work at the beginning of the lockdown to start working on a book. I had all the work spread out on the floor in my studio, and started finding many pictures that had something to do with the sense of inside and outside. Then I started posting some on Instagram without having any thought about it beyond that – it was just how I was feeling at the moment, but it was also putting me in that frame of mind. Then one day I was standing in my kitchen, and I saw my neighbor through the window and across both our yards. She was reading and the moment was so beautiful, that I had another “Aha!” moment. I should make this a project.
So to go back to your question, I'm working in the same manner and differently at the same time. I bought a medium format digital camera. I had been working mainly with film. I went digital because I realized there's such an immediacy to this work, and when you shoot through windows there are way too many unknowns due to reflections. In addition, nobody was developing film at that time, so I put a post on Instagram that I'm looking for people to photograph, and little did I know, I got an unbelievable response to this. I thought I was just going to go and make a picture more like a document by photographing people through their window, but it quickly turned into a real photoshoot. The reason I mentioned my other work about the relationship to the landscape, is that I found myself working in the same manner. A lot of the outside is reflected into the glass, and I'm photographing somebody who's inside, but seeing the relationship of that person to the outside, that is being reflected in the glass and now very much part of the frame. It became a welcome challenge for me to achieve the same level of collaboration with people and that same intimacy that I always look for in my work, but without having the opportunity of getting physically close.
I am not yet thinking about the longterm for this work – it is very much about being in the moment, but I'm enjoying this process quite a bit. It has kept me connected with people at a time where we were isolated. I also got to meet incredible people who have been so generous with sharing themselves and their time with me. I want to just make it fun for them as well and to represent them truthfully.
One can see the evolution on the work as this period has now dragged for more than 3 months. It was more “heavy” at the beginning and as time has been passing and we are now almost used to this new normal, the window is becoming a bit more like a stage, a frame where people could do anything they want within it. There was a level of performance that has now come into play, and there's something interesting about that. In addition as I am now editing the work, I am seeing the change of seasons reflected as we transitioned from bare trees, to flowers and now to more lush greenery.
One other thing about the way I'm shooting is that I usually shoot and then come back with many rolls of film. Then I work on editing and scanning, so the time when I'm shooting in the moment and when I'm editing are always separate. In this case everything is blurred. I feel like the work is getting noticed before I'm done with the work. So it's an interesting place to be, that's new to me.
MK: Right. Especially posting them on Instagram. You're getting feedback in real-time now.
RM: Yes. And I'm not posting everything. I'm holding on to many images. I photographed over 120 people, but might’ve posted about 20? That being said, I'm glad I posted some images. It got the Boston Globe to notice the work, it got you to notice the work, and very importantly, it helped me connect with a lot of people to photograph. Many reached out to me because they saw the work on Instagram. So in that instance, Instagram has been an ally and good tool for me for this project.
Marie, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from On Either Side of the Window
Nadav, Brookline, Massachusetts, from On Either Side of the Window
Austin, Boston, Massachusetts, from On Either Side of the Window
Ruth, Boston, Massachusetts , from On Either Side of the Window
Susan, Salem, Massachusetts, from On Either Side of the Window
Ellie and Megan, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from On Either Side of the Window
Amy, Grace and Harper, Newton, Massachusetts, from On Either Side of the Window
MK: That’s so great! I also wanted to commend you on your mid-career retrospective - In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar. As I understand it, this is also a traveling exhibition. Can you give us some background on how this came about, where it has been, and where we may see it next (post-pandemic, of course)?
RM: Yes! It was exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and then it traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art. And now it's stored at my studio ready for another venue! It was scheduled to be exhibited at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in the fall of 2021, but they decided to change the exhibition and timing of the exhibition to exhibit the On Either Side of the Window project in the spring of 2021 on the first anniversary of Covid-19.
MK: So there's nothing on the schedule for In Her Image coming up, but you’re looking.
RM: I have not been aggressively looking to be honest, so if you have ideas, please let me know. I have to say, since receiving the Guggenheim, I got busy traveling and making new work and my focus has shifted to creating work – it was a gift that was offered to me and I grabbed it. Now again with confinement I am focused again on making new work, different but timely, so I have not worked hard on trying to get another venue for the show.
In Her Image work covers different projects, from L’Enfant-Femme, Becoming, A Girl in Her Room, and Unspoken Conversations. It is about girlhood and womanhood, about growing up and growing old, from pre-puberty through middle age. And it includes women and girls from the Middle East and from the United States. It is an exhibition I am very proud of. It tied all my work together beautifully and I am very grateful to Joy Kim and John Rohrbach, the original curators of the show at the Amon Carter for seeing that and for creating that exhibition, and also to Barbara Tannenbaum from the Cleveland Museum of Art for taking that show to the museum as well.
MK: Well, let's hope you can get that traveling again, get it out of your house and get it out there in the world. So now you also mentioned the Guggenheim Fellowship Award. How has the impact of becoming a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 affected your work or process? Has anything changed, or was there more of an acceleration to the trajectory of your career?
RM: For the Guggenheim, I don't think I've ever worked so hard in my life. As artists, I think, there's often a lot of self-doubt. For me receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship was a huge validation. It gave me confidence in my work, and allowed me to take risks to crate a new body of work. Prior to the Guggenheim, my work was mainly created between Boston where I live, sometimes New York, and then Lebanon. The Fellowship allowed me to travel more widely within the US and within the Middle East. It was very enriching for me and for my project, on more levels that I can even begin to describe. Also, I'm just starting to work on a book for this work, with Radius. So I'm super excited!
MK: Oh, that's excellent news!
RM: Yes it is – it is kind of bit anticlimactic because I'm working now on the window project and my energy is there, but at the same time I can't wait to go back and edit more of that work. It will help me look at the images with fresh eyes, which is always a good thing.
MK: Just to clarify, the Radius book project is for which work then?
RM: For my project that I call SHE on my website. We might change the title, but that would be the project. I divided it into two portfolios on my website, but it's really one project that evolved a bit in a new direction and the book will be about a combination of both.
MK: Something for us all to look forward to then.
RM: Yeah. It's exciting. So that would be my next thing, I guess.
MK: Yes, I'll probably bring that up in the questioning towards the end as well. I'm kind of moving into some more general questions about your philosophy and process. What does a typical creative day consist of for you? Do you consider yourself a workaholic, or do you keep a schedule of time for family, socializing, vacation, etc?
RM: I don't know if I have a typical day. I tend to juggle work and family and have been ever since I had kids and started photography. They have always come hand in hand. I think they both help each other and this is a balance that I have tried to manage for many years. I would say a typical period would be where, especially if I'm in Lebanon, I tend to photograph a lot, spend time with my family, but then not think too much about the other side of what's going to happen with the work that I come back with. Then I have my editing period when I tend to spend a lot of time in front of my computer, making contact sheets, editing the work, selecting images, and making high-resolution scans. So there's a lot of work that happens after the shoot. I also make sure to photograph to schedule a few shoots regularly so I stay invigorated. I have four kids, two live in New York, one just graduated college, and I have a son who just started college in Boston. So I do travel a lot to see my kids as well.
My photography career was growing as my kids were growing up, and I feel like I learned to be efficient with my time, because I didn’t have a choice – it was all about juggling and all the time! It still is. I work a lot when I can, but then when I'm with my family, I try to be present one hundred percent. It’s not easy especially and there is a lot of blur in between but I try to be aware of it. We do take vacations and I always take my camera with me on vacation (!) just in case, but I try to disconnect when I can. My husband would say that I never disconnect but I try…
MK: That's often a topic of conversation - time management. How do you concentrate and focus on the work when you need to, and then distance yourself from it when you need to.
RM: Absolutely. It's hard because my studio is in my house. You have to be disciplined to be able to let it go and it is not easy. I realized that we need mental breaks on some level, like when Covid-19 first hit and we all kind of stopped everything. Everything went on hold. I now realize these are important moments when we're not constantly working and producing, because it gave us the room to come up with new ideas or to re-evaluate where we are. Sometimes these down moments are as important as the work moment. So it's important to literally force ourselves to grab them.
MK: Right. That makes perfect sense. Now, this is a very general question, but what is it that makes for a successful photograph? Does this success differ between your work and the work you gravitate to from others?
RM: I feel like when all the elements come together for the picture - the composition, the texture, the color, the expression, and the body language of the person, then it’s a great photograph. Sometimes I have no idea why one image stands out, but if it does, I just let it happen. Often one image from a great shoot stands out at the moment, and I tend to not to look at the rest. But I found that it is important to look at all the images again after a period of time has passed when one can see the work again with fresh eyes, as new images can shine then. This has happened to me on many occasions.
It’s harder for me to edit my own work and to be objective doing so, and it is sometimes easier to appreciate and/or help edit someone else's work, because I can see it with fresh eyes. I know my work too well and I tend to be harder on myself. I teach at Mass Art and it’s less challenging for me to edit and critique my students’ work than it is to do it for myself. I am looking at their with fresh eyes because I didn't make the work, so I feel that the standards are different.
MK: Sure. Do you seek advice during the editing process? Are there certain people that you ask?
RM: Yes. I have someone I work with whose opinion I trust very much especially as he understands my work very well. He also helps me with my files and even if I think I am a good printer, he can make my images sing in a way that I never would be able to myself!
I also rely on a couple of photographers/friends for help editing and we do that for each other. As for the book, I am looking forward to have Radius help me with the final edit of my book. When I have a show, I always welcome the curator’s or the gallery’s eyes on the work. It’s always a great privilege to have somebody else help you look at the work, and it forces you to see it through someone else’s eyes. Even if you disagree with the edit, it helps you form your opinion.
When my kids are home I always ask for their opinion as well. They have followed my work ever since they were little have developed a great eye!
MK: You’ve left the world of architecture behind, but is there another artistic medium that informs your work and process? Music? Film? Writing?
RM: I would say painting and somehow still architecture. Even though I'm not working as an architect anymore, I'm very aware of the lines and the space and how they align in the frames of my photographs. That's just second nature to me and very much part of how I see now. I also studied art history and did a lot of painting in college and beyond so I would say any influence/inspiration is mainly visual.
MK: Certainly, yeah. I can definitely see the architectural influence in your photographs. They're so compositionally strong.
RM: I think the way I work is also very architectural. I tend to work on projects and I tend to be pretty structured like that, even though there's nothing structured about the way I am as a person, but somehow the way I work, I think I am.
MK: Okay. So let me ask you, what do you feel is the best way for you to grow as an artist, and are there any fears behind treading new waters?
RM: I think there's always fears and uncertainty and I think it's okay to embrace that vulnerability. I find that it helps keep me humble and creative. I hope I’m always inspired and that I can keep finding projects that I'm passionate about, work that is personal to me but that could somewhat resonate with others.
MK: In conjunction with the last question, anyone working in an artistic field has matured and grown over time. Is there anything you’ve discovered lately that you’d like people to know about you or your creative process?
RM: I guess the most important thing is remembering to stay true to yourself and to treat the people you photograph with the utmost respect and never to take any of that for granted. The more honest you are, the more it will be reflected in the work. I hope that comes across in my work. I also realized that my personal and familial life has always inspired my work, and I now own that fact and hope it will keep inspiring what I make.
Kefa, Gambier, Ohio, 2018, from SHE
Rayven, Miami Beach, Florida, 2019, from SHE
Lea, Beirut, Lebanon, 2019, from SHE
Nour, Beirut, Lebanon, 2017, from SHE
MK: What steps do you pursue to find an audience for your photographs?
RM: Well, on a small level, I've been using Instagram lately. Websites are important. Also, every few months I might send announcement emails with whatever exhibitions I have or whatever's going on in my photography. I try to have my galleries show my work every few years.
I always recommend for people who want to start finding an audience for their work to attend portfolio reviews. They were immensely beneficial to me – especially the Meeting Place at FotoFest, but I've also done Review Santa Fe and Photolucida. Those portfolio reviews were very instrumental for me in putting my work in front of curators, art collectors, galleries, publishers, etc. Also, there are many juried calls for work, some of which are for really important exhibitions at wonderful venues. It is important to research the juror and the venue, and be selective, prior to applying as there are so many of those, that it can get overwhelming.
The book is always a fantastic way to reach a larger audience. And of course, exhibitions are essential to put the work out there.
MK: True. Now, you also have a role as Associate Professor of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In speaking to future generations of photographers, what might be your most influential words of wisdom to those setting out to make their mark in the photographic world?
RM: What I always tell students is that they have to find work that they love and are passionate about. Otherwise, they can get bored, and not make the work with the passion, energy, love, and integrity that it takes to make important work, work that will stand out. I tell them that they don't have to go to exotic places to make important work. It could just be in their own backyard. My advice is to make work about something you love, work that is personal to you and to make it with passion, and not to think about the results or the audience when you're making the work. This will happen later.
I was teaching a Portrait and Identity class at Mass Art this semester, and all of a sudden the course went online. I was in a panic. I had never done this before. How do you teach portrait making online? It was actually the best exercise for me and for my students, because it forced them to look inward and photograph their personal lives. The work they came up with was incredible and inspiring. So I feel like this is something I should use as an exercise moving forward.
MK: Wonderful. So as a final question, and just to kind of drive some of the points home that you had mentioned earlier, what's next for you? New projects? You have a new book coming out and you're looking to exhibit work. What else?
RM: Well, right now I have an exhibition coming up next spring about the work that I'm not even done working on. So that's exciting and it’s keeping motivated with the work I am making. And I am about to start working on the book, of course. I'm hoping that I could get exhibitions to coincide with the publication of the book. Also, I currently have a show happening now, at Richard Levy Gallery. The gallery just opened by appointment only and the exhibition got extended until July 31st so I am hoping a few people can get to see it!
As for the future, we're all on hold a little bit because nobody knows what's happening next. I'm grateful that I’m already thinking of an exhibition and a book. They're pretty tangible things at this moment.
MK: Right. And to this point, before we really started the interview, we talked about the fact that we have all of this extra time available to ourselves to hopefully, maybe, figure things out and make some plans for the future, at least.
RM: Yeah, it's interesting. I kept looking for silver linings. Isolation and confinement offered me the gift of time at home with my family, and in the studio with my work. I had almost forgotten how precious both are. It made me start editing my work for the book. It made me follow up with new ideas. On the personal level, I had all my kids back at home and that was very special time as well.
MK: Okay, excellent. Is there anything in particular that I didn't ask you about that you would like to talk about?
RM: Actually, now that we're speaking about this, I’m going to add something about working on the windows project. Talking about the connectivity, I realized how much everybody was craving an interconnectivity we very much took for granted before the pandemic, how important that human interaction is – for both of us on either side of the window and of the camera. Despite the fact that we only communicated across a physical barrier, we really and truly made a connection. I was very thankful to people because they were giving me their time, but I was also humbly surprised that on some levels, they were also grateful because somebody was coming over. So this whole sense of being connected is something I have been thinking about very much lately. In a way, this is also what you have been doing as well with the interviews and your blog. Thank you!
MK: Perfect. Yes, that’s wonderful. Thank you for that. Okay, Rania, I really appreciate this time that you have given me with your answers. I’m grateful.
RM: Well, thank you so much, Michael. Yeah, I do hope that we will meet in person again, somewhere. I appreciate it. Take care.
You can find more of Rania’s work on her website here.
All photographs, ©Rania Matar
Courtesy of the artist, Robert Klein Gallery/Boston, and Galerie Tanit/Beirut
