Rania Matar needed years to get inside Beirut's ruined Holiday Inn. Even with permission, the Palestinian-Lebanese-American photographer had to climb a spiral staircase for 24 floors, her subject beside her, two Lebanese Army escorts behind. The former hotel has not been repaired in 50 years.

When it opened in 1974, the 28-floor tower was a monument to the city's modernist glamour overlooking the Mediterranean. Militias fought floor by floor for control of its height during the 'Battle of the Hotels' in the first years of the Lebanese Civil War, using its rooftop as a sniper nest and burning it from the inside out. Matar, then a child living nearby, remembers watching from her apartment as "every single room burned one by one."

Half a century later she returned to photograph young women inside the carcass. The act distils what Where Do I Go? لوين روح؟ is about. Since the Civil War, a deadlock has kept the building frozen: a Lebanese company wants to convert it into condominiums, a Kuwaiti group wants to demolish it. Its heavily damaged frame keeps posing the question — what do you do with a wound you cannot close? Revisiting it to take photographs was "pretty exhilarating," Matar says. "Exhilarating, healing, whatever you want."

The project started organically after Matar visited Lebanon following the 2020 port explosion. Watching women work to reconstruct the city, she recognised a generation unsure whether to leave. "I saw myself in them," she says. Matar left Lebanon in 1984, when she was 20; these women were the same age now. "My friends who didn't leave, their kids are leaving. It feels like there's a sense of history that keeps repeating itself," she reflects.

Over multiple visits, her method stayed constant: post a call for subjects on Instagram, speak with whoever responded, build a collaboration from there. "I don't ask for pictures or anything [before meeting]," she says. "If they're replying, then they're willing to be part of this, and I figure they're interesting enough to be willing to put themselves out there."

The collaborations produced some of the book's most layered images. One woman led Matar to the south of Lebanon, to a gigantic bomb crater in the middle of a gorgeous landscape and a scene built around sandbags. "We went to this place, and she's standing on these sandbags where snipers hid during the war. And she was wearing, by her own choice, her mother's engagement dress. So there were two layers of memory here in some way. I would have never known these areas if she hadn't taken me there," Matar recalls.

The same woman later took her to another site and told her: 'I'm part of the land. The land is part of me. I want to be photographed naked in it'. "I'm so honoured that they would trust me to do things like that," says Matar.

That trust is visible in the 135 portraits that make up Where Do I Go? — women, including Matar herself, inscribing themselves back into a still-contested landscape. Shot between 2020 and 2025, the monograph was co-published last November by Beirut's Kaph Books and the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, priced $55. In March, full-scale war resumed in Lebanon, with Israeli ground operations in the south. One of the deadliest airstrikes of the conflict occurred in June, just before a ceasefire renewed on 19 June — the same day an exhibition of the work closed in Boston. The project was on gallery walls throughout.

Matar is alert to how such work circulates. Asked whether a book from a Western-distributed press risks becoming the consumable Middle Eastern grief Western audiences have long had an appetite for, she does not hesitate. "I completely am aware of a Western audience. But that's exactly why I don't want to include this," she says, referring to straightforward images of destruction. She shot those images and says doing so mattered to her, but she deliberately kept them out of the book. Such pictures tell the one truth Western audiences already know how to receive, she reflects, without being altered by it. She once walked out of an exhibition of Arab photographers, she says, because it was "all about the hijab and wars, catered to an American audience the way they want to see it."

Asked what she hopes someone will feel looking at the work in 30 years, Matar laughs under the weight of the question. "They might just look at it and say, 'Here we are again'," she says. "I'm hoping people would look at it like, 'Oh my God, look how far we've come'."

The book will be republished in time for this year's Paris Photo in November, while the war continues to hang over everything beneath it. In that shadow, the question Matar found on a crumbling wall remains urgent: where do I go?