U.S. news headlines from August 4, 2020: The 30 million+ Americans out of work and collecting unemployment will not receive the extra $600 a week they had come to count on, as the President refuses to work with congress on a follow-up stimulus package. 1,265 new coronavirus deaths reported, bringing the American total to more than 4.74 million cases and 153,000 deaths (stats from August 4, 2020). Faced with these figures, Trump says the death toll “is what it is,” in an interview with “Axios on HBO” and calls Dr. Deborah Birx, his own Coronavirus Response Coordinator “pathetic.” British news outlets leak previously withheld police bodycam footage showing George Floyd did not resist arrest, pleaded, “I just lost my mom” before officer Derek Chauvin took his life by kneeling on his neck, as Black Lives Matter protests continue across the country.

Onto this chaotic, disturbing, culturally divisive news landscape fell a media bombshell that landed especially hard on Americans with ties to Lebanon. In the heart of Beirut, a stockpile of more than 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate which had been stored in the port reportedly since it was abandoned in 2013, detonated, causing explosions so violent they were felt in the mountains 15 miles away. The catastrophic explosion reduced much of the city’s port area to rubble, leveled entire neighborhoods and destroyed historic buildings. At least 220 people were killed, thousands were injured and left homeless and 110 people are still reported missing according to the BBC. Authorities continue to investigate the cause of the blast, while the people of Lebanon cite long-standing political corruption and negligence worsened by the myriad consequences of the pandemic.

The news shattered photographer Rania Matar, a Brookline resident who was born and raised in Beirut. Matar’s expansive body of work - primarily portraiture addressing themes of individual and collective identity, female experience and cultural signification - often features subjects from Lebanon and the Middle East. She has family living in Beirut, as well as friends.

Matar talked about the shock of the news when we spoke recently by phone. She worries for her family, the city she holds dear and the people of the country she has lovingly documented through the years. Matar says the blast leveled an already suffering city, in a country awash in poverty and hunger, ruled by a negligent government. She hopes there may be a silver lining around this tragedy, that perhaps this will be the final straw to break the back of the institutionalized corruption that brought Lebanon to the brink of collapse even before the blast. But like many people familiar with Lebanon’s recent history, she feels skepticism towards the effectiveness of the August 10th cabinet member resignations.

Matar, an internationally renowned, astonishingly prolific artist and devoted mother of four is not one to suffer paralysis. Moved to act, with an intention to raise funds and awareness for her country’s plight, she teamed up with SEAL USA (Social and Economic Action for Lebanon) to launch a campaign. SEAL provides equipment, advocacy and support directly to local groups for economic recovery and job creation in Lebanon where 30% of the population lives in poverty. Working directly with Lebanese NGO’s, SEAL has dispersed $2 million since the explosion to facilities and organizations providing shelter, food, medical support, and rehabilitation.

In collaboration with SEAL, Matar offered a limited edition of one of her portraits for sale through the SEAL website, with 100% of proceeds going directly to their multi-partner Beirut Emergency Fund. She posted information about the campaign on her Instagram account and sent a few emails to friends. To her surprise, the campaign received a massive response and the prints, at $1000 a piece, sold out in 10 hours. 

When the first image sold out, she decided to offer a second to take advantage of the response. About the first (Ghinwa), Matar said, “She is like a phoenix rising out of the ashes.” Of the second (Lea) she notes, “I selected this image as (for me) it says so much about Lebanon: its beautiful architecture, its destruction but also its resilience, its inspiring young generation that still hasn't lost faith in the country, the strength and the courage of its women, and much more, but... also the colors that are reminiscent of the flag.”

As the leadership of SEAL USA explained in an email, “Rania Matar’s print fundraiser attests to the power of joining forces and expressing support through different mediums. Rania did it beautifully through her art.”

The fundraising campaign raised $67,000 for the Beirut Emergency Fund through the print sales alone.

“This is my way of dealing with tragedies - the only way I know how to,” Matar said by phone when we spoke recently. “I turn them into projects.” Moments of global upheaval chart a course through the map of her career. Trained as an architect, she decided instead to devote herself to photography after the attacks of September 11.

“I was tired of the way the media was portraying women,” she explained. She felt an imperative to depict our shared humanity and women and girls’ experience through life stages and cultural moments. 

Her work started to attract notice when she took portraits of Lebanese people in 2006 in the immediate aftermath of the Israel–Hezbollah War. That work was heralded by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston when they chose her as a finalist for their coveted Foster Prize in 2008-2009, along with artists Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrew Witkin and Joe Zane. 

Since then Matar has been exhibited in museums around the world including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art among others. She has published three books and has received numerous grants and awards. Portrait series including She and A Girl and Her Room of young women, Unspoken Conversations of mothers and daughters, Becoming and L’Enfant Femme of adolescent girls and Women Coming of Age, document the emotional and physical experience of women and girls in various stages of maturity, mirroring the life stages of her daughters and her own. Two themes weave powerfully through all of Matar’s work with women and girls - collaboration and empowerment.

On August 4, when the news of the Beirut explosion hit, Matar was immersed in a a pandemic inspired series entitled “Across Windows” which has gained significant attention in the art world.

“Across Windows” originated in early April of this year, when Matar was busy editing work she had shot all over the world over the previous two years. In 2018, Matar received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, an unrestricted grant which allowed her to travel and work non-stop until COVID hit. The Fellowship, awarded to only 175 of the 3,000 who apply each year, encouraged working “under the freest possible conditions” and put her in company with other Guggenheim fellows such as the poet Mary Oliver, novelist John Irving, artist Glenn Ligon, sociologist Sherry Turkle and fiction writer Annie Proulx.

When the realities of life under COVID sunk in and she could no longer travel, Matar thought she would take a breather and work on the enormous body of work she had shot with the support of the fellowship. But before long she found herself itching to shoot, missing her subjects, collaboration and connection. It was around this time that she found an image she had shot of a young girl in front of a window.

Something about the tension between the inside and the outside worlds in the image struck her as germane to the current moment. She posted the photograph on Instagram with a caption inviting people within a thirty mile radius to contact her if they would like to have their portrait taken. Soon she had willing subjects lining up to pose for her in the windows of their homes. It’s a way, she explained, to keep working while staying within current guidelines; to “physically distance without social distancing.” To date she has shot 135 portraits in the series.

Much of Matar’s work investigates the relationship between a subject and her environment. In this series, the environment is reduced to the space inside the window or doorframe. The glass creates reflections which are key to the power of the image, refracting the interiority with pieces of the outside environment. Most of her subjects for this series came through social media or referrals. She put no requirements around who she captured. Most were people she didn’t know. As she explained, “the virus is a great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman, straight or gay, black or white, rich or poor.”

“People are so resilient. They have found ways to adapt to a truly unthinkable situation. People leave out flowers, chocolates and notes written on stones. They feel bad that they can’t invite me in and offer me something.” After months of quarantine, people are craving connection and the act of taking a portrait creates a special kind of connection, a connection that requires careful observation and collaboration.

Portraits from “Across Windows” feature in an online viewing room on the Robert Klein Gallery website through September 7, 2020. The project will also be exhibited next year on the one year anniversary of COVID at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College:

In many ways, Matar’s work investigated the interplay between outside and inside prior to this project. It feels like a continuation of her career-long study of the human experience, and of identity, especially of women during different stages of their lives.

Throughout the Middle East, she has captured young women by their windows, deep in thought, perhaps experiencing a sense of a self locked inside, even before the pandemic made staying inside mandatory.

Like many artists, Matar says the work gets her through the trauma. Despite it all - the war in Lebanon in 2006, the trauma of 911, the gaping unknowns of the coronavirus and now the glaring preventability of the Beirut explosion - she finds the truth of the human spirit, that it can not be diminished by any war, virus or blast; and that kindness, empathy and connection will bring it blooming back to life even if it’s for a moment languishing in darkness.

If you would like to learn more from the artist directly, she will be giving a talk via Zoom on September 23, for the Minneapolis Institute of Art - it is free and open to the public. 

* All images courtesy of the artist and Robert Klein Gallery/Boston. Cover image: Alae, Khiyam Lebanon, 2019.

Matar’s latest book, SHE, is due to be published in 2021 by Radius books.