L'Enfant-Femme

As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, Matar’s cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative inform her photography. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity, through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood. 

  L'Enfant-Femme portrays how young women between the ages of eight and thirteen interact with the camera, and it reveals their identities in deeply personal and poetic ways. The series is about representation, about looking, about being looked at, and about being in transition. When facing the camera at the dawn of adolescence, girls are exposed in a new and different way, reminding us of the fragile self-image of a preteen. Matar beautifully captures girls' developing identities at this key moment in their lives. 

 With an introduction by Queen Noor of Jordan