CAN YOU SEE ME?
Featuring Maggie Steber, Rania Matar, and Eva Woolridge

How can one person be so many things? Leica Gallery Boston’s exhibition Can You See Me? seeks to address the barriers – of age, race, femininity, representation – that women face across cultures. Working with three renowned female photographers, we uplift their stories of reclamation, interdependence, and perseverance through visual storytelling.

Maggie Steber’s series, Madje Has Dementia, is an intimate recording of her mother’s voyage over the melancholy sea of dementia. As an only child of an only parent, Steber oversaw her mother’s care for nine years, sharing that voyage of being forgotten. She used photography as a therapeutic tool to survive this longest goodbye. In doing so, Steber discovered the real Madje; not someone defined only by the role of mother, but the woman her mother was and always had been. Steber never intended to share this work publicly, which makes the intimacy far more profound. As the walls between mother and daughter fell away, revealing unseen aspects of Madje’s character, a gift appeared: the gift of a last chance to love.

Rania Matar is a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, who has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood – both in the U.S. where she lives, and the Middle East where she’s from. In SHE, the focus is on young women in their twenties – the ages of her own daughters – in relationship to the environment they find themselves in after they leave home, and the more global, complicated backdrop that now constitutes their lives in transition. The process is collaborative and evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it their own. Rania focuses on their strength, their majestic presence, their essence, and physicality. By collaborating with women in the U.S. and the Middle East, Rania is ultimately highlighting how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines.

Eva Woolridge is a Queer, Black & Chinese portrait photographer, public speaker, and social activist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her series In These Hands: Black Birth-workers’ Project is a photographic coverage of her documentary film created by women of color for women of color.

The Problem: In the U.S., Black women are 3x more likely to die from childbirth or pregnancy-related complications than white women. “We know the primary reasons why: systemic racial inequities and implicit bias,” said Vice President Kamala Harris, April 13, 2021. Most recently in June 2022, Roe vs. Wade was overturned, and bodily autonomy is no longer a human right for women, trans and gender-nonconforming people.

The Solution: In the creation of this film, three Queer Black filmmakers travel 8,000 miles in a van interviewing Black midwives, doulas, mothers, academic scholars, and leaders in the reproductive justice movement to highlight the significance of ancestry, the importance of listening, and the necessity of choice. Starting in NYC, they traveled via van to capture the stories in New York, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Northern California.

Woolridge’s team needs donations to complete this incredible documentary.

Dates: APRIL 25 – JUNE 8, 2024