Rania Matar
When Working Assumptions contacted me to photograph Saquawana, I knew it was right up my alley. Most of my work has been about my role as a mother, and Saquawana was a caregiver for her mother and her sister, and she was very pregnant. She was caring for three.
I followed her around for two or three hours, and I took a lot of photographs. At some point she stopped being self-conscious. It became natural. In a good shoot, there’s a trust that gets established, and it shows in the photos.
Rania is a Lebanese-born American photographer based in Boston, MA.
I started in photography by taking pictures of my own kids. Eventually, when I started taking pictures in Lebanon, I realized that I was drawn to photographing women and children. I remember someone once asking me, “where are the men in your photos?”
“Oops!” I replied, “where are they?” A focus on femininity became consistent in my work moving forward.
My series Girl and her Room was based on my older daughter; it was about teenaged girls and their bedrooms. For that project, I was really focused on capturing a woman in her own space, in her environment.
When that project was finished, I started photographing younger girls for my series that I called L'Enfant-Femme. That was based on my younger daughter, who was—at the time—prepubescent. Her body was changing, and her whole attitude was changing at the same time. I became interested in documenting that process.
Eventually, when my older daughter left for college, I started a project on mothers and daughters. As she was leaving, I realized that my role as a mother was changing, and that I was getting older. It was a way of examining the aging process. When you put a mother and a daughter side by side, it’s almost like you’re looking at the same woman a few years apart.
Motherhood affects your whole life. You have to find a new balance when you have children. It becomes a juggling act. I was an architect before I had my children. And I worked long hours. But when I had my kids, I started working from home, and before I knew it, I had become a photographer. On some level, motherhood changes you. It necessitates a change.