When Rania Matar went back to Lebanon after decades away, she didn’t approach the trip with a grand plan. She was simply meeting a young woman to photograph, walking with her through one of those abandoned buildings that still dot the country. Concrete dust, broken tiles, silence. Then a line of graffiti on a torn wall stopped both of them: “لوين روح؟” — “Where do I go?”
The words felt too direct to ignore. They became the thread that pulled Matar into her new book, Where Do I Go?, published by Kaph Books.
The book holds about a hundred portraits of women across Lebanon. The settings shift constantly. Someone stands by a curtain with a complicated floral pattern; another climbs through the frame of a gutted cinema; elsewhere a woman pauses in a field where the landscape hasn’t quite recovered from whatever last tore through it. Sometimes the backgrounds feel heavier than the figures, sometimes the opposite.
Matar doesn’t treat these women as subjects to arrange. The work is more conversational than that. A session might start in one spot and then drift because the person she’s photographing insists on exploring the building or wants to try something that wasn’t discussed. Those moments end up shaping the image.
“When they have room to move, things open up,” Matar says. “They take charge in ways neither of us planned.”
The book moves across Lebanon in fragments — the coast, the steep folds of Mount Lebanon, older Beirut houses with their cracked stonework, and places still carrying the marks of conflict. Matar isn’t documenting ruins for their own sake. She’s watching how these young women hold themselves inside environments that have already absorbed so much history. Some look steady, some restless, some simply present.
She doesn’t pretend the photographs solve anything. “I hope people pause long enough to see what’s still there — the beauty, the hope, the humanity,” she writes. “These pictures are my love letters to the women of Lebanon.” The line feels earned rather than sentimental, especially placed next to the quieter images.
A major exhibition under the same title opens at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art in Bloomington, Indiana, next spring. It runs from March 5 to August 2, 2026. The book includes writing by Leila Reichert, Kim Ghattas, Youmna Melhem Chamieh, and Georges Boustany, along with vernacular photographs from Boustany’s collection.
Preorders for Where Do I Go? are available through Kaph Books.
