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Just two weeks after the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, Lebanese-born American photographer Rania Matar began to consider how this new, universal human reality could be viewed through a photographic lens, and as a result, the work  titled “On Either Side of the Window: Portraits During Covid-19” started with Rania photographing her housemates in quarantine and soon evolved into a project in Massachusetts with more than 100 people involved.

Rania captured the intimacy, beauty, anxiety and rhythm of everyday life in quarantine by photographing the figures behind doors and windows. The project also combines a number of contradictory themes: inside and out, loneliness and unity, real and artificial, uncertainty and monotony. These themes are strongly conveyed through womenhood and female adolescence, which Rania has photographed in the US and the Middle East.

Matar’s exhibition of 27 photographs honestly presents to the world the period when inside spaces became both a refuge and a prison. The window we see in most photos, symbolizes a transparent barrier that protects and blocks; a tool to frame, reflect and protect. It symbolizes the object that both separates and protects us from the outside world.