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To expand diverse representation in photography.
Leica Camera has announced the winners of the third annual Leica Women Foto Project Award in partnership with Fotografiska and VII Photo Agency, with the aim of expanding diverse representation in photography and empowering the female point of view.
Rania Matar uses photography to highlight the shared human experience, particularly that of women, in both the United States and the Middle East.
Through photography, Rania Matar could see that her experience growing up as a woman was very similar to that of her daughters, despite their generational and cultural differences. She grew up in Lebanon during a civil war; she was raising her children in the United States. “People are people,” she told In Sight. Whether in Massachusetts or the Middle East, women go through similar milestones in life. They have mothers, they transition from being children to young women and perhaps then become mothers themselves.
“She Who Tells a Story” opens at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston this week. Four of the artists included are Iranian; three — Ms. Tavakolian, Gohar Dashti and Shadi Ghadirian — live and work in Iran today. The exhibit also highlights work by Jananne Al-Ani, Boushra Almutawakel, Rana El Nemr, Lalla Essaydi, Tanya Habjouqa, Rula Halawani, Nermine Hammam, Rania Matar and Shirin Neshat, the fourth Iranian artist, who lives in New York.
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For her series A Girl and Her Room, Rania Matar photographed teenage girls in the privacy of their rooms as a sort of lyrical commentary and analysis of girls in transition to womanhood.
Rania Matar’s work focuses mainly on women and women’s issues. She has created searing documentaries of the lives of women and children in the Middle East, the Palestinian refugee camps, the recent spread of the veil and its meanings, the aftermath of war and the Christians of the Middle East. The universal theme: revealing the day-to-day existence of people who have been forgotten or misunderstood with singular compassion and sensitivity. At her home Boston, Massachusetts, she photographs her four children at all stages of their lives and is currently working on a new body of work, “A Girl and her Room,” photographing teenage girls from different backgrounds