Portraits of American and Middle Eastern young women entering adulthood from Rania Matar, author of L'Enfant-Femme

As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, Rania Matar's (born 1964) cross-cultural experiences inform her art. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood--both in the United States where she lives, and in the Middle East where she is from.

Rania Matar: She focuses on young women in their late teens and early twenties, who are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality. Depicting women in the United States and the Middle East, this project highlights how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Each young woman becomes an active participant in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it her own. Matar portrays the raw beauty of her subjects--their age, individuality, physicality and mystery--and photographs them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them: beautiful, alive.