The year 2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the civil war from which Lebanon is still suffering.
In the past three years, conditions for Lebanese people have deteriorated fast. After years of brutal conflicts, precarious peace, corrupt governments, months of protests and the pandemic, the Beirut port explosion on 4 August 2020 plunged Lebanon into the abyss. That day, a detonation of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate killed at least 218 people and injured more than 7,000.
There followed a total economic meltdown with shortages of cash, gas, electricity, medicine and water. However, I found hope and inspiration in the generation of young women who were volunteering in Beirut’s reconstruction after the explosions. Instead of destruction, I chose to focus on their majestic presence – their creativity, strength, dignity and resilience.
We collaborated against meaningful backdrops – the layered walls of Beirut, the Mediterranean, mountains, traditional and abandoned buildings, and the many levels of destruction accumulated over the years.
This is a portrait of Demi Kanaan, who was injured in the port explosion, taken one year after the incident, in the mountain village of Brummana, outside Beirut. “We were mesmerised by the fragmented building,” says Kanaan. “Each broken piece told a familiar story.”
Kanaan now lives in the mountains but the explosion was fresh in her mind. She wanted to own the date again, and be photographed with smashed glass. She said it was cathartic. The next day she got a tattoo of broken glass.
I see my younger self in these women. I was their age when I left Lebanon in 1984 during the war, in what had been the largest wave of emigration – until now. Many are now at that same juncture.
The work is focused on Lebanon, but speaks to the whole era of life in the Middle East; to the collapse of a country but also to the resilience and creativity of a population as seen through its women, at a time when women from the Middle East are grossly misrepresented in the media.
It also speaks of exile – my own, but also those young women’s and the painful decision they face in determining whether to leave home, or to remain despite the conditions.
Rania Matar was born in Lebanon and moved to the US in 1984. Her work explores issues of identity through photographs of adolescence and womanhood, and has been exhibited in museums worldwide, as well as featuring in permanent collections. She has published four books and is associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design
