The Arab-American photographer brings her award-winning series of images, A Girl and her Room, to the UK for the first time. This series features intimate photographic portraits of teenage girls in their most personal space, their bedroom.

This project began by Matar photographing her teenage daughter with her friends. She soon realised the girls were very conscious of each other in the way they behaved and represented themselves when together. From there emerged the idea of photographing each girl alone in her personal space, where she would give a more honest representation of her personality.

Matar took as her subjects teenage girls from the two worlds she experienced herself as a teenager and a young twenty year old, making this project very personal: the Middle and the United States. She became fascinated by how girls face similar issues at that age, regardless of culture, religion and background.

Matar comments: “In my images I hope to portray the chasm between childhood and adulthood and the young women straddling it, sometimes as rebels, sometimes as young ladies aware of their newfound sexuality and very often still as children. Being with those young women in the privacy of their world gave me a unique peek into their private lives and their real selves.”

Born and raised in Lebanon, Rania Matar moved to America in 1984 where she studied art and architecture at Cornell University. She later studied photography at the New England School of Photography. Her work has won several awards, has been featured in numerous publications, and exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally, and her images are in permanent and private collections. Her second book A Girl and Her Room is due to be published in the spring of 2012 by Umbrage Editions.

Exhibition brochure

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