Just life, frame by poetic frame

If all that’s not enough, Matar’s first book, “Ordinary Lives,’’ came out last month, and she was a finalist last year for the Institute of Contemporary Arts’s Foster Prize.

“Overwhelming and fun’’ is how Matar, speaking over lunch at an Indian restaurant in Coolidge Corner, describes her recent ubiquity. “I felt embarrassed e-mailing people so much [about the shows]. But I got over it. And I had one in Lebanon and London, as well.’’

A vivacious, animated woman, Rania Matar (RAHN-yuh muh-TAR) lives in Brookline with her family. Her husband owns a construction company in the South End. They have four children, ranging in age from 9 to 15.

In 1984, Matar came to the United States from Lebanon, where she was born and raised, to attend Cornell. She recalls flying into New York with her father and renting a car. “We drove five hours,’’ Matar says. “I’d never been in a car that long. In five hours you can drive around Lebanon three times!’’

Having lived in the United States for a quarter-century now, Matar speaks with a faint, if musical, accent. She has “a foot in each culture,’’ she says. With her family, she goes back to Lebanon each summer - and by herself several times a year to photograph.

Lebanon provides the material for “Ordinary Lives.’’ Subjects range from life in refugee camps to scenes of Lebanese Christian culture. A thread running throughout is the situation of women and children. Matar says, “A lot of things that happen in Lebanon - the war, the camps, the [wearing of the] veil - I feel the women bear the brunt of decisions that are not made by them and they’re the ones who make sure their families survive.’’

A sense of duality informs Matar’s work. Much of that duality is what one might expect: East and West, rich and poor, war and peace. But what’s most striking about Matar’s photography is another duality: its balance between the realistic and poetic. She is the documentarian as lyricist, someone who, recording the incongruous, discovers the transcendent.