Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic nearly a year ago, we have been forced to transform the ways in which we engage with the world. With the threat of infection literally lingering in the air, many have retreated into social isolation, a physically and psychologically challenging feat unto itself. With no end to the pandemic in sight, many have sought deeper connections with their daily practices to maintain some semblance of equilibrium in an increasingly uncertain world.
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For Lebanese/Palestinian-American photographer Rania Matar, the pandemic created a radical shift in her personal and professional lives. As a portrait photographer, Matar’s work challenges xenophobic, Islamophobic notions of “them vs. us” that flooded the American media following the events of September 11. A natural extrovert possessed with the profound gift for creating warmth and intimacy with her subjects, Matar uses the camera to collapse barriers created by jingoistic propaganda and fearful ignorance, revealing the innate humanity that lies beneath the surface of things.
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Awarded the 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her series She, which will be published this June by Radius Books, Matar has spent the past few years traveling the globe making photographs that explore female adolescence and womanhood in the United State and the Middle East. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, Matar put her travels on pause and began to consider making art from a different vantage point.
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