Ordinary Lives: your purchase benefits in part LCC (click image to buy)Review by Mary El-Issa

"No one will forget the women and children in the pages that follow, the ordinary lives in times that are cursed by being anything but ordinary."
– Anthony Shadid

There is nothing ordinary about the way Rania Matar captures the essence of people's lives in the Middle East. She has a great knack for photographing sincere moments of human daily interaction with humility. Her photos are raw, honest, and unpretentious.

Matar's new book Ordinary Lives (Quantuck Lane Press 2009) features photos from three bodies of work: The Aftermath of War; The Veil: Modesty, Fashion, Devotion or Statement; and The Forgotten People. Her images shed light on people, mostly women and children, living in Lebanon. "Lebanon in particular is interesting because of its key location as a gate to the Middle East, between the West and the Arab world," she says, explaining her motivation for choosing Lebanon as the nexus of her latest work. "I am a Lebanese insider who speaks the language, knows the country, and understands its people, but I am also an outsider who can see Lebanon and its complexities through Western eyes."

In the section The Aftermath of War, which marks the aftermath of wars in Lebanon from 1975 to 2007, lives co-exist with shadows of destruction and memories of loved ones. Amid the bullet holes on walls, the grief, and the scattered skeleton of buildings, we glimpse a smiling face, a budding hope, and the solid conviction that life must go on. "Through my images I hope to honor some of the people who have to deal with war's devastating realities intruding in their daily lives," Matar thus salutes the bravery of the subjects of her images.

"Defiant": photo by Rania MatarIn The Veil: Modesty, Fashion, Devotion or Statement, I find myself looking at an intimate portrayal of women who choose to wear the veil. "In Lebanon Muslim women do not have to wear the veil by law, but wearing it is rapidly becoming the decision of choice among many, young and old, modern and traditional," Matar points out the reality of such choice. No matter what their reason is for wearing the hijab, women continue their life with a determined sense of normality. The image of two veiled women sitting on the side of the street while two other women in jeans pass by offers a unique juxtaposition of the Muslim and Westernized dress code of females in Lebanese society.

The Forgotten People offers fragments of what it is like to live in the Palestinian refugee camps around Lebanon. "There are an estimated 360,000 Palestinian refugees who live in deplorable conditions in twelve refugee camps scattered around Lebanon." Matar states. The poverty in the images is evident, but so is the endurance of people living under such miserable conditions. I was touched by the images of children playing, women cooking, and elderly people exchanging snippets of talk on the streets.

Ordinary Lives begins with a haunting poem by Lisa Suhair Majaj and concludes with a beautiful essay by Anthony Shadid.

Mary El-Issa is a quality assurance engineer and photographer in Los Angeles, where she serves as the photo and media editor at the Levantine Review.