Myriam Boulos: Reclaiming Beirut through her lens

At 16, Myriam Boulos longed for a camera like her best friend’s—sleek and sophisticated, alive with potential. Her mother, reticent, encouraged her first to develop her eye and gaze. This early lesson in truly seeing—offering patience and space to discern the truth of what’s in front of her—is a skill that came to manifest viscerally in each of her images. Myriam’s work captures humanity in all its arresting, unguarded, aching lucidity.

She soon began using the camera to confront the fragmented reality around her. Born in 1992 in Lebanon grappling with reinvention, Myriam has wielded documentary photography as a medium of radical exploration, capturing the layers of Beirut’s youth, its subcultures, and its spaces of resistance. Now a Magnum nominee and a celebrated voice in contemporary photography, she has etched her place as an uncompromising chronicler of the personal and political realms of modern life.

After earning her master’s degree in photography from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts (ALBA) in 2015, her work quickly gained recognition on the international stage, featuring in esteemed exhibitions such as Infinite Identities in Amsterdam, the Troisième Biennale des Photographes du Monde Arabe and C’est Beyrouth in Paris, and Photo Week in Berlin. After winning the Purple Lens Award, she paved the way for her first solo exhibition, and by 2019 she had her second solo show at the French Institute of Lebanon. 

Her work straddles the streets and the interiors of Lebanon, documenting lives that resist easy categorisation. In her debut photobook, What’s Ours, published by Aperture, Myriam presents a decade-long visual memoir that inextricably links revolution and intimacy. Her craft deftly captures the city in stages. Most markedly in 2019, when protests broke out calling for the downfall of Lebanon’s political and economic structure, and in 2020 following the devastation of the Beirut port explosion. Her lens stripped back the collective, rightful defiance of a nation, extracting raw and individual moments of reclamation. 

Daringly, tenderly, Myriam gravitates toward what’s deemed provocative: nude self-portraits on Beirut’s streets or moments of intimacy and solidarity in hidden spaces. Her images are an uncompromising declaration of presence. Unencumbered by colonial and patriarchal visual traditions, Myriam reframes her region’s portrayals. Often diaristic, her images speak of textured realities: youth navigating oppression, women reclaiming their agency, and subcultures forging spaces of belonging. Her artistic influences—Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, and Daido Moriyama—surface in her refusal to estrange political and personal moments. 

In July of 2020, Myriam co-founded Al Hayya, a bilingual magazine dedicated to amplifying women’s voices across the Arab world. Aiming to dismantle stereotypes and offer representations that honour complexity, Myriam’s hand in creating the magazine was a mere extension of her intrinsic convictions about storytelling as a means to equity.

Myriam uses photography as a way of processing and sharing the unfiltered truths of her and her people’s experiences. Her images invite viewers to see Beirut anew, alive with stories of courage, rebellion, and pervading vulnerability—cementing her legacy as one of the most compelling photographers of her generation. 

She is now compiling a project about the repercussions of war on people with autism—tenacious in her commitment to unearthing unseen stories. With family in Southern Lebanon, where Israeli bombardments continue, Myriam finds herself witnessing her city endure destruction once again. Even amid the wreckage and turmoil, it is work like hers—unyielding in its insistence on the warmth and grit of unvarnished humanity—that honours the resilience and complexity of those living through it.