From the Personal to the Universal: The Tools to Create Intimate Portraits
with Rania Matar
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Course Description
“The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
In this day of iPhones, Instagram, and selfie culture, images of people are constantly part of our life in more ways than they have ever been. However, capturing a powerful portrait goes well beyond the quick press of a button.
Acclaimed portrait photographer and teacher, Rania Matar, reveals the key elements that make powerful portraits during this engaging two-presentation webinar. Rania delves into the process of working with people from approaching potential subjects, establishing trust, and developing a relationship. In this all-important process, one learns to pay attention to detail, postures, expressions, and the use of the environment, while working through the process and all the details of creating a great portrait. Rania also discusses the use of framing, natural light, location, background, body language, the significance of the gaze or not, as well as paying close attention to the relationship of the photographer to the subject throughout the entire process.
Rania shares her tools, her process, and reviews the many different aspects of portraiture — close-up portraits, environmental portraits, documentary portraits, collaborative portraits, self-portraits, group portraits, and conceptual portraits. She also discusses editing your work, putting a portfolio together, portfolio reviews, and important resources for photographers.
This two-session online program with Rania offers community, connection, and reveals important new ways of working with people and making intimate and creative portraits.
Additional Information
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View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
For the convenience of participants, recordings of each class session are posted privately for one month after the end of each session. Santa Fe Workshops takes the recordings down after one month to protect the intellectual property of our instructors.
about
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Rania’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums.
A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and American University of Beirut Museum.
Additional solo museum exhibitions include Middlebury Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Fitchburg Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, and the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University. Her images were also part of the exhibition “Women Defining Women” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Rania has received several awards, including the 2022 Leica Women Foto Award, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (also 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, a 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award, and a 2008 ICA/Boston Foster Prize. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, and Outwin Portrait Competition 2022, with an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.
Rania curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran, Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. 2025. She has published five books: Where Do I Go? 2026; SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; and Ordinary Lives, 2009.
Website: raniamatar.com
Instagram: @raniamatar
