An Interview with Rania Matar, Part 1 / 2010 January 21 by Sariah Choucair-Joseph

Rania Matar’s photographs illuminate and surprise us with joy. Exploring themes of feminity, defiance, family and metamorphoses, her photographs capture the cataclysmic moments when insecurity becomes defiance, and destruction becomes rebirth; when past lives recede and futures are grasped. Focusing on women and children, she reminds us of the common, treasured moments that make lives but never headlines. Her first monograph, Ordinary Lives, was published in September 2009 and is available for purchase here. It is with great pleasure that I bring you the following interview, in two parts.

Could you tell us how you began the series of photos in Lebanon? They convey the reality of the war in a very real, even relatable, way. I wondered, looking at them, if they helped you deal with the reality of Lebanon’s destruction during the wars – the shock of leaving Lebanon as a student in the eighties and returning to more suffering and destruction.

I grew up during the civil war in Lebanon. When I was twenty I moved to the US to continue my architecture and art studies at Cornell. The mind has the power of selective memory, and I made myself forget all I had lived through during the war. I avoided anything political in college and focused on enjoying college life, graduating, working as an architect, getting married and having kids (4 of them!).

While pregnant with my 4th child, I took photography workshops and instantly fell in love with the medium. Eventually, I think as a reaction to the constant, negative news about the Middle East in the West, especially after September 11, I wanted to tell a different story about the Middle East. Things seemed to fall into place for me in 2002 when I went to a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. I saw beautiful women and children living in terrible conditions and I was humbled by their dignity, their resilience, and the beautiful moments one can find even in less than ideal conditions. I started photographing the beautiful moments of daily life in the Middle East. Telling human stories through photography became my passion and, eventually, my career.
In 2006, I was stuck in another war. This time I was a mother myself and had my children with me. All my forgotten memories of the war came back to me, all the horrors of it. At that point my priority was getting my kids out of the country so we left via Damascus. At the Lebanese/Syrian border we saw trucks loaded with women and children. It was surreal, and a wake-up call: every single person living this war (or any war for that matter) has a story to tell. I instantly decided to return to Lebanon as soon as the war ended to document and photograph the war’s aftermath, the time when the world forgets about the war and moves on to other big news, but a very real time for the people who suffered the war. It is the moment they have to come to terms with all they have lost and rebuild their lives all over again.

War and its effect on people is very real to me and now, in some ways, I am dealing with it. Living in the US, I watch, like everyone else, news and wars from the comfort of my living room – almost like watching a movie. We hear of the destruction of far away places we don’t relate to and of the death (collateral damage) of people we don’t know. It is so abstract. I wanted to show that war (again any war) affects normal people like you and I and is very real.

Something that really strikes me about your photos of the Middle East is their lack of politics. We are so used to seeing the destruction and suffering of war and of the Palestinian crisis in terms of the politics of the region – there always seems to be an implicit slogan or call to arms. The absence of propaganda makes your photos more effective. Do you take the photographs with the intent to de-politicize the situation or is this a natural product of your method?

I am glad you asked me this and that you get the feeling from my work that it is not political. I very consciously stay away from causes people to dehumanize their opponents, to look at one another as friend or enemy, similar to us or different. I think it is by looking through political lens that we stop looking at people as human beings but as friends or enemies, as similar to us or different.

When we put politics aside we can look at people’s faces and eyes and see the person behind the politics, a person who is just like us. We can see a person’s humanity. What drove me to this work was that I was sick of the politics of this whole area, sick of politicians and their slogans, and sick of the lumping of people into one category or another.

Some of my favourite photos are of the women in the Middle East, particularly the project named “The Veil: Modesty, Fashion, Devotion or Statement.” What I particularly like is that they never explicitly state the women’s religion. A viewer would have to be familiar with the religious melting pot in Lebanon to appreciate the differences. Could you speak a bit about the interest veiling holds for you?

Located between the West and the Arab World, Lebanon is a melting pot of religions and cultural influences. People from different religious and cultural backgrounds interact on a regular basis. As a result, there are many different concepts of female fashion. Women in Lebanon do not have to wear a veil. When I grew up in Lebanon, very few women wore the hijab. It is a pretty recent phenomenon.

In the West people tend to associate the veil with oppression and a lack of education thus giving the veil a rather negative connotation. I became very interested in learning about the veil and the reasons some Muslim women choose to wear it. I found that here is just a different story to be told. I was trying to portray the woman behind the veil. For me the emphasis was not on her religion, even though it is implied, but on the girl, the young woman, the mother.

The project started when I was photographing a girl in a refugee camp. She was 9 years old and spent about an hour finding the perfect veil to match her clothes. She was braiding it, layering it, changing colors, etc. It reminded me of my daughter, who was the same age, who spent about the same amount of time fixing her hair in the morning. I was fascinated to discover that the veil had a fashion aspect to it among young women, and I became interested in understanding the reasons behind its comeback, and the different meanings it carries. Photographing women and the veil became another aspect of chronicling womanhood in Lebanon.