The building in the foreground is in the village of Kfarkila, in southern Lebanon. The land beyond it, with its light mists and green-dappled hills, is northern Israel – a world away despite its proximity. The border wall then in construction between the two countries runs below this building, just out of view. On her tiptoes, with the breeze picking at her robe, it looks as though the young woman, Mariam, could rise up and sail across the wall to that horizon.
This striking shot is by Lebanese-American photographer Rania Matar, who was taken in January 2022, in a relative lull between one set of crises engulfing Lebanon and another. Matar began photographing young Lebanese women in the wake of the Beirut port explosion in 2020, when the country was also reeling from a financial meltdown. “I was in awe of the young women working in the reconstruction,” Matar says. She spent the next five years connecting with women via Instagram and documenting their lives, embattled yet defiant, for her new book Where Do I Go?.
She had photographed Mariam several years earlier for a different project. This time she wanted to explore what life was like in such close proximity to this hostile border. “Driving with her and a friend, w We found a building under construction [from which] we could see into Israel,” Matar recalls. “It was very eerie, because it’s a landscape that looks identical to the one we were in.”
Since the photograph was taken in 2022, much of the border region, including Kfarkila and Mariam’s nearby hometown of Khriam, has been pummelled by Israeli shelling, and in recent weeks Israeli troops have crossed into Lebanese territory. One million residents have been displaced. “I keep checking on them,” Matar says of Mariam and her family. “I think they had to evacuate. I don’t know where they are.”
For all the jagged edges in this image, there is beauty too – on both sides of the border. Matar found something “almost hopeful” in it at the time, she tells me. “Little did I know it would be shattered now.”
Where Do I Go? will be published by KAPH and the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art on 2 April