Friday, March 5th, 2010...11:08 pm
my meeting with rania
on monday afternoon i met with rania matar. for those of you who did not see my earlier post, for one of my classes (design issues and processes) we were required to select a local artist, interview them, create a piece of work inspired by their work, and then present our interview and our project to the class.
i chose rania matar, a photographer based out of boston. most of her work focuses on the middle east, although she has now started to do more work her in america. her latest project is titled a girl in her room, which is (logically) a series of girls in their rooms.
my meeting with her was really really interesting. i went to her house to meet with her actually. she was running around printing large photos to bring with her to a photography festival in houston. i felt bad that i was taking up time that she needed to prepare for traveling but she said she was fine and she really didn’t mind!
the woman was so generous. i talked with her for about an hour. we talked about her work, her background, and where she finds her inspiration to create all of these pieces. as an artist, i know, that this is really personal. sometimes, it is just really hard to share with people, especially someone you’ve never met (i.e., me!). she has had such an interesting life, growing up in lebanon during the civil war, moving to america to study architecture, raising a family, and now, living as a published photographer. her perspective is unique, and i think that is something that you can see in her photographs.
we talked about a lot of stuff but i’m going to share something that stuck with me. when she was talking about photographing palestinian refugees, she mentioned that many of her lebanese friends and family members couldn’t understand why she would want to photograph a refugee family or a woman of hezbollah. and she said (this is paraphrased), that it was the american in her that made her want to photograph these people. that if she hadn’t lived in america for so long, she would be so accustomed to their presence in her life, she wouldn’t have seen their struggles as something different/worth capturing.
i thought this was really an incredible statement. and i found that i could relate to it. everything in our lives shape us. even though rania is lebanese, her viewpoint is completely different from her lebanese friends and probably from most of her american ones too.
so then i looked at myself…. my neighbors are middle eastern, i took a class about the middle east last semester, and last year i lived in a country that had been occupied by the moors for hundreds of years. are these some of the reasons why i am so affected by her work? is it because i feel some sort of connection to her images? these questions made me re-examine the way that i look at my likes and dislikes….
what connects you to your likes and dislikes?