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Who we are is how we are. How we live, love, hate, fear. How we are when we are alone, by ourselves, in our own room. In our space, in a place that we can truly call our own, when no one is watching and we are finally free, at peace, as one. Who we are is always in a state of flux, a state of evolution towards a truer or falser self, a being that we both expose and protect, that we exist as and exist with, throughout our lives. And perhaps one of our earliest declarations of self is how we live when we grow up, in our parents’ home, defining ourselves.
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Photographer Rania Matar has just released A Girl and Her Room (Umbrage Editions), a collection of portraits of teenage girls from the United States and Lebanon photographed in their rooms and the affect is stunning in its simplicity. The girls share more in common with each other than not, even though the externals—wealth, religion, culture, fashion, and culture of femininity differ remarkably. Perhaps this is because external differences can only go so deep and once they are identified, we need to look beneath. Into the eyes of each girl to feel her energy, her pride and prejudice, her power and strength, her fear and discomfort, her love and grandeur, her sense of self as she understands it.
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Matar has done the remarkable in creating continuity so that at first glance the very obvious differences between lives disappears. The unpainted, unplastered walls of a girl’s room in a Palestinian refugee camp melt away as we look at how Miriam, who lives there, has inhabited her space. She carefully hangs a few things, photographs, a prayer rug, a scarf and purse, from the window gate above her bed, in as much as a thin mattress on the floor serves as her nest. She sits on the mattress with eyes that tell of an awareness of self and of life beyond the walls of her room. We cannot begin to imagine what she has seen and known in her short time on earth but we feel from this image that she holds together, centered deep inside herself.
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Opposite this image, something far more American, a girl named Sidonie lies across her bed with her head flipped over the edge, her hair tumbling down to the ground. Her bed is luxurious comfort compared to Miriam’s thin mattress, and her room is decorated with care. She hangs ten purses around her bed, along with the names of her favorite brands cut out from advertisements and hung to the walls. The contrast is remarkable in as much as we see how much some have and how little we need, and how comfort goes far beyond the physical world into a state of being. Sidonie, hanging her head so that we cannot see her face, is hiding from Matar, from this project, from herself.
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Throughout the book the images contrast and complement until one is constantly checking the captions to see where each girl is from. The distinctions of décor and dress somehow fade away at first glance as the body language, gesture and expression of each girl becomes the thing that becomes most telling. And that’s the thing that is most remarkable. The less a girl has the more powerful her image feels. She has but herself and she knows this well. She does not rely on things to define who she is. On the other side are girls who appear to have it all but one look in their eyes shows they are no happier for it. Chances are likely they didn’t work for most of it; that which they own is given by others until it becomes something of a prison. A weight around each of their neck, a vision of the feminine that they try to live into by purchasing it. They paint their face and do their nails and pose underneath photographs of half naked models. They aspire to look like others, rather than themselves, so caught are they in the American Dream.
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Return to Lebanon and we see girls with a different set of concerns yet all the same, they have more in common than they do not. They have the same issues facing their lives, their final years at home before they venture out into the world. On whose terms, it cannot be known, but as we look at Matar’s portraits we understand that each has her own destiny to uphold.
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