In my photography, I have been documenting my life through the lives of those around me, focusing on the personal and the everyday in an attempt to portray the universal.  My work focuses on girls, women, transitions, and identity.  It is somewhat autobiographical and draws inspiration from my own identity and my daily life.  It has its basis in my being a woman and a mother, but also in the duality and contradiction of a hyphenated cultural background. I am a woman, I am a mother, I am American, I am Lebanese.  While my photographs focus on the familiar, the mundane, and the familial, the work speaks to the universal as well as the personal experience.

While I had been photographing teenage girls in A Girl and Her Room, pre-pubescent girls in L'Enfant-Femme, and adult women in Women Coming of Age, I found myself gradually including both mother and daughter in the same photograph. My focus shifted from the singular individual to the collective, combining and cumulative. Casual glances, hand gestures, subtle shifts in body language, physical closeness (or lack thereof), shared embarrassments, vulnerability, and admissions of uncertainties became the focus of the photographs. The glances and the emotions of the individual are combined within a single frame, conveying simultaneously the personal and the universality of the complex mother and daughter relationship.

The work is a collaborative dialogue that explores the complexity of female maker to female subject, and of womanhood on each side of the camera - a spoken and unspoken conversation.

click to view the complete set of images in the archive