There’s no easy way to look at images shaped by war, memory and inheritance without also thinking about the lives still unfolding inside them. Photographer Rania Matar turns her focus toward young women coming of age in her home country of Lebanon, where uncertainty has become a constant. Photographed in the years following the 2020 Beirut port explosion, the lingering effects of Lebanon’s protracted unrest, the work lives at the intersection of the personal and the collective in her new book ”Where Do I Go?”
Matar doesn’t center spectacle or destruction in her work. Instead, the photographs move subtly. A body against a crumbling wall, a gesture held just a moment longer than expected, a landscape that feels both picturesque and unsettled. The women in these images aren’t simply being observed; they’re shaping the process, bringing their own stories, instincts and boundaries into the frame. What builds over time is a sense of trust, and with it, a kind of shared authorship.
“Where Do I Go?” is a body of work that seeks to intimately reflect a generation navigating seemingly impossible choices: whether to stay, whether to leave, how to imagine a future when the past keeps circling back.
