Female beauty is on display in "SHE," a touring exhibition at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. But in Rania Matar's large-scale color photographs, beauty is not just skin-deep. The subjects are lovely, luminous young women depicted alone or in pairs. Their hair is long and loose; feet a re bare. And where faces are visible, none is smiling. Matar has captured these women entering the portal of adulthood; they appear to embrace their wayfinding with introspection and quiet confidence. Matar, a Lebanese American photographer based in Boston, is an associate professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Born in Beirut, she and her family fled the country's civil war in 1984, but she continues to revisit and take pictures in the Middle East — including at refugee camps not far from her birthplace. For her "SHE" project, Matar chose settings in Lebanon, Egypt, France, Massachusetts and Ohio. Each composition is as much a portrait of place as of a person: the Mediterranean shore, a once-grand building mutilated by bombs, a summer meadow, an urban enclave rife with graffiti. Significantly, the images utterly reject the traditional male gaze with regard to femininity, sexuality and victimhood. They also disrupt stereotypical (mainly Western) assumptions about Middle Eastern and Muslim women. As the collection's accompanying book puts it: "[Matar's] art is part of a larger tradition of subversive women artists who speak back to a Eurocentric history of subjugation and possession." The book's introduction describes Matar as a "wanderess" — a passionate traveler and pursuer of experiences. Her interest in photographing women began with her own twin girls; previous projects documented their childhood and adolescence. "Photographed with their belongings, her models expressed angst, shyness, confidence, and a developing sense of selfhood," the text explains. Matar began the series that would become "SHE" when her daughters left for college. These images, according to her book, "reveal a more fully realized physicality as the women come of age, forming complex relationships with environments outside the familiarity of their childhood homes." Jodi Rodgers, curator of collections and director of engagement at the Middlebury museum, noted in a phone call that, for Matar, her subjects are not simply models; they are collaborators. The artist encouraged their participation and agency. The "SHE" project began during an artist residency at Kenyon College, where Matar met students who "had a sense of detachment — away from home… ...read more read less