Join J. Sybylla Smith in conversation with Rania Matar about her new book, SHE. Raina Matar is a 2022 finalist of the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraitures.

*Note: In honor of the 50th episode of Got Punctum?, Radius Books invites our audience to purchase Rania’s book, SHE, for 20% off. Use the following coupon code at checkout: TG56A1V
Offer valid through October 31, 2022.
Thank you, Radius Books!

As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, Rania Matar’s (born 1964) cross-cultural experiences inform her art. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood―both in the United States where she lives, and in the Middle East where she is from.

Rania Matar: She focuses on young women in their late teens and early twenties, who are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality. Depicting women in the United States and the Middle East, this project highlights how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Each young woman becomes an active participant in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it her own. Matar portrays the raw beauty of her subjects―their age, individuality, physicality and mystery―and photographs them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them: beautiful, alive.

Photography by Rania Matar
Texts by Mark Alice Durant and Orin Zahra

Published by Radius Books
*Purchase Rania’s book, SHE, for 20% off. Use the following coupon code at checkout: TG56A1V
Offer valid through October 31, 2022.
Hardcover / 11.5 x 13.5 inches
83 images / 184 pages
ISBN: 9781942185833

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