Essays by Susan Minot and Anne Tucker

Award-winning photographer Rania Matar’s A Girl and Her Room reveals the lives of girls from two disparate worlds—The U.S. and Lebanon. Set in the girls’ bedrooms—which range from spartan cleanliness to chaotic disarray—these portraits offer an insider’s perspective of not just who these young women are, but the physical spaces that prove to be extensions of their identities.

RANIA MATAR was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. Originally trained as an architect at the American University of Beirut and Cornell University, she also studied photography at the New England School of Photography and the Maine Photographic Workshops in Mexico with Magnum photographer Constantine Manos. She teaches photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and in refugee camps in Lebanon.

Matar has won awards at the New England Photographers Biennial, the Women in Photography International, the Prix de la Photographie Paris, and the 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography. She has accumulated honorable mentions at the 2010 UNICEF Picture of the Year Award, the 2010 Lens Culture Exposure International, the Silver Eye Center for Photography Fellowship, and the Photo Review. She was selected at one of the Top 100 Distinguished Women Photographers by Women in Photography, and was a finalist for the distinguished Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Her images are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide. A Girl and Her Room is Matar’s second book, and was chosen as a Top 50 Winner in Photolucida’s Critical Mass, won the 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and received a 2011 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowship. Her first book, Ordinary Lives, was published in 2009.

SUSAN MINOT’s first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and received the Prix Femina Étranger in France. She is the author of Rapture, Lust & Other Stories,Folly, Evening, and Poems 4 A.M., and wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty.

ANNE TUCKER is the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a department she founded in 1976, and has authored a number of books.

Award-winning photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington spent eight years living and working in West Africa, with four years spent in Liberia. His book Long Story Bit by Bit entwines documentary photography, oral testimony, and memoir to map the dynamics of power, tragedy and triumph in Liberia’s recent history. It depicts a past of rebel camps, rainforest destruction, Charles Taylor’s trial as a war criminal, and other happenings contrasted with the hope for the future. Long Story Bit by Bit brings an extraordinary range of characters to life. Hetherington`s story begins in the rainforest while living with a rebel army during the 2003 battle for Monrovia. Hetherington remained in Liberia as a unique witness to the cycles of history. During this time he became fascinated by the dynamics of power unraveling in Liberia: from the raw force wielded by young men of rebel groups, to the corrupt authority of transitional governments, juxtaposed to the possibilities of a democratically elected president. This book attaches names and faces to the current headlines and provides a background for the present state of Liberia, clarifying the notion that the past decade was not a product of random chaos.

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