Photos Zoom Into Arab, U.S. Girls’ Bedrooms
A bedroom can say a lot about anyone, but when it comes to analyzing the characters of teenage girls, the room can offer an intricate delve into their lives.
That’s what one photographer based her project on, but with an added edge.
Comparing the bedrooms of girls from the Middle East and the U.S., Lebanese-born Rania Matar’s photo series, titled A Girl and Her Room, showed a stark comparison between two groups of adolescent girls living on different sides of the world.
“They are so vulnerable at that age. They are trying to fit in … figure out who they are and how they want to present themselves to the world,” Matar said in an interview with BuzzFeed published on Tuesday.
Matar, who is based in Boston, felt she was able to capture the experiences adolescent Lebanese and American girls endure.
In Lebanon, she snapped images of girls in cosmopolitan areas of Beirut and refugee camps in other parts of the country – this in itself showed dramatic differences.
“Some of them were in very cosmopolitan part of Beirut, some were in refugee camps, and some were in Boston or on the East Coast where I live. But I felt that at the core those girls were going through the same transitional experience.”
Despite the geographical, and sometimes political, factors at play, Matar found that there to be one crucial aspect shared among all girls – the feel of having a bedroom.
“It feels like the world puts you out of control, and this is the one space that they can control — it’s theirs,” she said.
Matar feels a need to highlight her photo series now more so than ever.
“All you hear on the news is how different we are. It became so important for me to include the girls in Lebanon. To show the similarities through this shared experience. It became very personal to me on some level. It is personal, but maybe it’s universal at the same time,” she told the entertainment website.
Al-Arabiya