Where Do I Go?
Updated: Sep 15
Rania Matar’s photographic love letter to the women of Lebanon, tracing the borders between leaving and belonging.
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As a child, Rania Matar stood at her bedroom window, binoculars pressed to her eyes, watching the 24-story Holiday Inn burn floor by floor. She watched the Lebanese civil war engulf Beirut, as the once-glamorous hotel became a towering, bullet-ridden, concrete ruin. For two years, the Holiday Inn operated as a fashionable hub for Beirut’s affluent society. But when the war erupted in 1975, the hotel became the epicenter of the months-long Battle of the Hotels—an urban sub-conflict in which Beirut’s high-rise hotels became strategic military assets and front lines in the country’s 15-year civil war. What Matar witnessed from her bedroom window would become an ingrained memory of her youth, and decades later, an image she would return to through her own photographic practice.
Nearly 50 years later, Matar returns to the same gutted Holiday Inn, this time stepping inside the vacant hotel herself. She moves through its exposed corridors, carefully tiptoing her way around fragments of rubble scattered across dust-coated concrete. Inside, she photographs a striking, young, red-haired woman named Petra, wearing a yellow dress and barefoot among the debris. She sits poised atop a suitcase. She appears suspended in thought, as she confronts a question that Matar has often asked herself and one that gives her newest book its title: Where Do I Go?
It’s a formidable question, familiar across generations of young Lebanese women who have lived amid uncertainty and repeated cycles of conflict. Although Lebanon’s civil war ended in 1990, the country continues to endure periods of war and instability— from political assassinations and sectarian clashes to the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, the spillover of the Syrian Civil War, the devastating 2020 Beirut port explosion, and renewed fighting with Israel and military occupation in southern Lebanon. Through her viewfinder, Matar finds herself transported back to her own youth, when she, too, was a 20-year-old woman confronted by the disorienting uncertainty of war.
In 1984, Matar left Lebanon during the civil war, abandoning her architecture degree at the American University in Beirut and, with it, the country, community, and sense of home she had once known. She transferred to Cornell University in the United States, where she continued to merge her love for art with architecture, and steadily developed the visual language that would later define her practice. Years later, after building a family of six, Matar picked up a camera to preserve the fleeting memories of their childhood. Inspired by her children, her practice would grow into two major bodies of work including Ordinary Lives, which examines the tender relationship between mothers and children in the aftermath of the civil war in Lebanon, followed by three books comparing and contrasting young girls and teenagers both in Lebanon and in her new adopted home in an affluent suburb of Boston.
But as the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent U.S.-led War on Terror devastated the world and reshaped American perceptions of the Middle East, Matar began to reconsider her own relationship to the region, finding a renewed sense of purpose for her work. Her departure from Lebanon marked a rupture with a place and an identity she would carry long after she left. In that sense, Matar’s 240-page photobook, Where Do I Go?, which started after the 2020 port explosions in Beirut, attempts to mend that fracture and archive the enduring sense of belonging shared by Matar and others forced to leave Lebanon. As Matar herself describes it, the book is a love letter to the women of Lebanon–to “the ones who stayed and the ones who left but can never leave.”
In one image, a woman named Rhea embraces herself, her arms wrapped tightly around her bare chest, her exposed back turned toward a tall, shattered window. Behind her, two unhinged doors lean against scathed walls where layers of royal blue paint have peeled. Vegetation has reclaimed its space as vines climb the walls and branches scatter across a purple-carpeted floor. The building’s former elegance remains visible beneath the decay. Her vulnerability is visible: her bare upper body exposed within an enormous room marked by the devastation of war. But there is no sense that the ruin diminishes her; Rhea herself remains self-possessed, her interiority and composure remain entirely her own.
In addition to Matar’s remarkable ability to understand and compose architectural space, she brings to her work a profound understanding of the ethics of intimacy. Many of the women she photographs begin as strangers: women she encounters in stores, restaurants, on the street, or through posts on social media. What may begin as an awkward introduction gradually develops into a collaborative relationship, grounded not only in mutual trust but in conversation, reciprocity, and a willingness to share personal spaces and stories. For Matar, photographing is not a one-sided act of observation, but rather a process of creating the conditions in which a woman can decide for herself how she wants to be seen.
Forging this culture of female autonomy is particularly important to Matar. Having lost her own mother at a very young age, and shaped by her experiences as a woman, a mother of four, and, more recently, a grandmother, she understands the influence women exert across generations. In a conversation with one of her daughters while she was a student at Columbia University, her daughter told her, “I suppressed my Palestinian identity because my mother suppressed hers.” From an early age, Matar’s own father had mentioned that he, too, did not want to burden her with his Palestinian identity. This tension, whether spoken of or intentional, has followed Matar across generations. Now, Matar understands the innate inheritance of identity and silence, an inheritance that is not always conscious, yet can shape how women come to understand themselves and one another.
Against the stunning backdrops of Lebanon–the textured, brightly colored lime-washed walls of Beirut, the marble-columned palaces, the drained swimming pools, the abandoned theaters, the gardens of olive trees, the Mediterranean, the worn couches— Matar photographs the environment that not only shaped her own childhood, but the landscapes inhabited by her parents, and the spaces now occupied by the young women she photographs. By inviting these young women to engage with these places, Matar provides a moment to reflect on their own relationships to Lebanon, while they, in turn, introduce her to parts of the country she had never experienced before and to stories and histories beyond her own. The process of creating these portraits becomes a form of shared discovery and a way of exploring environments and memories that tether every one of these women to the land.
Located along what was once known as Beirut’s Green Line, the dividing zone between East and West Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, the 40-story tall, Burj El Murr Tower, had been used by snipers during the conflict. Despite multiple attempts, including, at times, attempting to enter by trespassing, this was the single building Matar struggled to gain access to. Conveniently, however, her subject, Tamara, lived directly across the street, offering Matar another way of engaging with the structure and the history it belonged to.
From Tamara’s apartment, Matar installs a camera obscura, filling the room with an inverted projection of the building across the street. The structure is cast onto Tamara’s body, its war-scarred facade falling upside down her bare back, each window seemingly aligned with the rivets of her spine. The building, the infrastructure surrounding it, and the land on which it stands form the backbone of this young Lebanese woman. The impossibility of entering the structure becomes beside the point. Even with the limitations she encounters, Matar finds a way to confront Lebanon’s history, bear witness to its violence, and preserve the memory embedded within the landscape.
This speaks to Matar's profound attachment to land, an attachment she sees as particularly visceral across both Lebanon and Palestine, and sometimes difficult to relate to from a Western framework. While many, in previous generations, looked toward the West as a place of safety or possibility, there now seems to be a growing sense of disillusionment amongst the younger generation with what the West represents. For some, leaving no longer carries the same promise it once did. Though the impulse to remain, return, or maintain a connection to the land is not merely because they feel confined to the singularity of that option, but because land here takes on a particular significance in a country where successive generations have experienced war, displacement, and emigration.
In another image, Rhea now stands along a wide, shallow-stepped staircase, her hair spun into tight ringlets. She carries 16 colorful balloons, some patterned with polka dots, others that say “Happy Birthday” and “I love you”. Behind her, graffiti scrawled across the dark concrete wall reads the Arabic words “مين اقوى” translated to “who’s stronger”. To some, the image reads as a tender celebration, a moment of youth and affection; to others it becomes a question or perhaps even a declaration of power. In Where Do I Go? Matar does not attempt to resolve the question posed by its title. Rather, she allows her photographs to instead create space for the women in them to confront their own contradictions and determine for themselves what it means to stay, to leave, to return, and to belong.
The question, therefore, belongs not only to the Petra seated on the suitcase, but also to Rhea carrying the balloons, to Matar herself, to her mother, to her four children, and to generations of women who have lived, transformed, and sacrificed themselves to the land they call home. To Matar, Lebanon is not simply a place one leaves behind. It is heavy on the body, embedded deeply in memory and inheritance, and inscribed across the landscapes that have absorbed generations of war. It lingers in the architecture, in the ruins, in the land. It exists in what has been lost, but also in what persists: it exists in the women who remain and the women who left but can never leave.
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