☀️

BRAM VAN VELDE    

1895-1981   

Sans titre    

Simone Baltaxé Martayan. Cedar, 1973.

Staff Pick of the Week

I’m highlighting Rania Matar’s latest photography book, She, published in October of 2021 by the New Mexico-based non-profit publisher Radius Books for this round of staff picks. Radius has donated over 75,000 of their fine art and photography books to libraries, schools, and art programs since their founding in 2007 and earmarks a portion of each publication for donation to underfunded libraries and arts programs. 

Rania Matar was born in Lebanon in 1964 and relocated to the United States in 1984. Matar is an award-winning photographer, most recently a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, whose work focuses on the daily lives of women and girls, informed by her cross-cultural experiences. The composition of the book, and the way it juxtaposes motifs across geographic space (the first two images above come on consecutive pages, image 8 & 9 are on facing pages) creates a sense of continuity of the feminine experience that transcends place. She is Matar’s fourth photography book. We also have Matar’s L’enfant-Femme (Damiani Editore, 2016) here in Special Collections – a potential future post. That work focuses on girls in their pre-teens and early teens in the United States and Lebanon, with geographical and cultural differences bridged by the common experience of growing up. 

Click on the images for captions.

View our other posts on photography books.

View more Staff Picks of the Week here.