A Girl and Her Room

"[What's] most striking about Matar's photography is . . . its balance between the realistic and poetic. She is the documentarian as lyricist, someone who, recording the incongruous, discovers the transcendent." —Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe

Award-winning photographer Rania Matar captures the interior lives of teenage girls and young women in intimate portraits taken within the personal spaces of her subjects' bedrooms. From Spartan cleanliness to chaotic disarray, stark and paint-chipped to clothing-cluttered and graffitied, each room offers an insider's peek into the mind of the girl who lives there, her values, her desires, and her fears. Photographing girls from both the United States and Lebanon, Matar has succeeded in an unbiased documentary that questions what it means to grow from girl to woman and how our identities spill over into our material worlds.

Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon, moving to the United States in 1983. Her projects—which examine Palestinian refugee camps, the recent spread of the veil and its meanings, the aftermath of war, and the Christians of the Middle East—return voice to people forgotten or misunderstood. She has won numerous awards, and her images are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide. Matar's first book Ordinary Lives was published in 2009. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer whos books include Monkeys, Folly, Lust & Other Stories, and Evening