A Tacit Inheritance

Rania Matar’s project, Unspoken Conversations, is a meticulously crafted portrait series that depicts womanhood at two seminal stages of life, adolescence and middle age, with both mother and daughter included in a single frame. The images reveal each subject’s subtle glances, gestures, and emotions that convey simultaneously the personal and universal complexities of the mother and daughter relationship. “In this work,” writes Matar, “I seek to focus on our essence, our physicality, our vulnerability, on growing up and growing old – the commonalities that make us human, to emphasize underlying similarities rather than apparent differences across cultures and to ultimately find beauty in our shared humanity.” Claffey’s ongoing series, Matrilinear, offers a poetic window into the layers of memory embedded in a series of simple object portraits that embody a collective thread weaving together past, present, and future. “Women play many complex roles within the structures of kinship: daughter, sister, cousin, mother, aunt, grandmother; these roles can be fluid and at times overlap,” says Claffey. Matrilinear aims to create space for the deep knowledge base that women can develop through interaction with home space and each other.” Taken together, these two photographers explore cross-cultural and cross-generational themes of universal womanhood.