Myriam Boulos was born in 1992 in Lebanon. At the age of sixteen, she started to use her camera to get closer to reality. She graduated with a master’s degree in photography from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. She has taken part in collective exhibitions including Close Enough at ICP , NY; Infinite Identities at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; and Body of evidence at Cortona on the Move, Cortona. Her work has been published in Aperture, FOAM, Time, GQ Middle East, Vogue Arabia, and Vanity Fair France, among other publications. Myriam was awarded the Foam Paul Huff award, Hendrik teNeues photography award, Eugene Smith Fellowship, PHmuseum Women Photographers Grant, Grand prix ISEM, and Foam Talent, and she is an Arab Documentary Photography Program and Joop Swart Masterclass alumni In 2021 she joined Magnum as a nominee, and in 2023 her book, What’s ours, was published by Aperture.
Myriam Boulos
What's Ours
I was born in 1992 in Lebanon. When I was 5, I had a fuchsia camera that I loved, and my younger brother threw it away from the car window on the highway.This incident felt like a soap sliding off my hand, like reality escaping from me. At the age of 16, I started to use a small camera to get closer to reality.
During my first years as a photographer I only took pictures at night, in black and white. I think that the nightlife is similar to revolutions: It is about collectively exteriorizing things that we are taught to bottle up.
I took pictures in the streets and in spaces of intimacy, where we are most exposed to both physical and emotional violence.
In October 2019, the revolution started in Lebanon.
For me it felt like collectively coming out of an abusive relationship to finally say: No, this is not normal. This is when I started taking pictures in color, during the day too. This is also the moment I started to include text in my work.
On August 4, when the explosion happened in Beirut, we hid in the bathroom and hugged, waiting to die. The next day, I started documenting the aftermath. I believe that giving space to personal stories is an act of resistance, and defying the traditional ways of representing our region is a way of reclaiming what’s ours.
This book curates a selection of images taken in my twenties, from 2013 to 2023. What’s Ours is a documentation of intertwined revolutions and attempts of liberation, that go from the intimate to the political.