Rania Matar’s L’Enfant-Femme centers on girls poised between childhood and adolescence. Photographed in the Middle East and the United States, her subjects meet the camera with expressions that can be guarded, inquisitive, self-aware, or playful. Their differences of place, background, and religion remain visible, yet Matar also draws attention to the shared uncertainty of an age when identity is beginning to be consciously performed and claimed.

The project takes on particular force within a culture of constant photographing, tagging, and posting. Rather than treating these girls as practiced makers of online personae, Matar asks what happens in the direct encounter between a young subject and a photographer. The resulting portraits examine representation and looking without reducing their subjects to illustrations of vulnerability. Youth appears fragile, but also restless and joyful; the sitters are not passive figures, and their awareness of the lens becomes part of each image.

L’Enfant-Femme is attentive to a threshold that is both psychological and social. Childhood candor coexists with apprehension, curiosity, and an emerging sense of personhood. Matar’s approach is candid and poetic, allowing contradictory states to occupy the same frame rather than imposing a single account of girlhood. The movement between two broad geographical contexts further resists a narrowly local reading: common experiences emerge, but not at the expense of individual presence.

Published by Damiani in 2016, this 152-page hardcover is Matar’s third monograph. For collectors concerned with contemporary portraiture, representations of girlhood, or photography’s changing role in the construction of identity, its importance lies in the precision of its subject and the ethical tension of its gaze. It records a formative stage of life while also addressing the conditions under which young people are now seen—and learn to see themselves.