In the Heat of the Moment: Myriam Boulos Reflects on Beirut’s Tumult
With text by Nadine Khalil
When I speak with Myriam Boulos, we comment on her website, which was bought by an online gaming platform. “My bank blocked my Internet card,” she says, unfazed, referencing the economic collapse in Lebanon that has seen severe restrictions on cash and credit transactions. Her eponymous domain now carries the subtitle, Different Ways of Playing. The irony is not lost on her. A digital artifact—not unlike a still photograph—implicates the act of seeing by concealing what came before the image and what will come after it.
Boulos’ photographs have captured distinct moments in Beirut’s contemporary history. Her flash-heavy images are raw and confrontational, from evocations of youth cultures that exist on the fringes of mainstream entertainment, to the October 2019 uprisings and the horrors of a devastated Beirut post-blast. Yet underneath all the fury, her photography practice masterfully distills a human frailty.
Boulos has often spoken of getting carried away by the overwhelming wave of her city’s protests, and the crowds of people resonating together. But her lens imposes a distance from the documentary. In the drama of urban environments, she focuses on marginal spaces of encounter. While her flash brings the viewer closer to the surface of an image—to skin, scars, or the back of an ambiguous heeled shoe—her eye seems to flit in and out of scenes like a flâneur. There’s a transience to her stills, a heightened emotiveness that’s just on the verge of despair.
Some of her subjects expose themselves—in rooms and elevators, on paved sidewalks—nude but crouching in a shy intimacy, faces often obscured. When Boulos herself appears in a self-portrait, she hides too, beneath her hair, in an embryonic stance. “It’s my favorite position,” she reveals; though she herself is endearingly shy.
Distinct from voyeurism, the notion of temporary dwellings in the city as sites of rupture and disembodiment is a motif that permeates Boulos’ work, especially after the August 4th explosion, where buildings were punctured and laid bare, and interiors were made exterior. “I feel like the conditions since the revolution have taken me outside my body,” she says. “At the time, going out with my camera was a coping mechanism. There was so much to take in. Rather than slowing things down, it was like having a filter between what was happening and myself. Like being inside things but also having a chance to process them on the outside.”
Boulos says she has taken a step back to find coherence in her images of 2020. Text has begun to appear in her work in the form of diary entries. At 1:03 am, on January 13th, 2021 she wrote:
The revolution is rising again.
Same feeling of a big wave swallowing me.
Forgetting everything else.
Not responding to emails.
Not looking at myself in the mirror.
It is weird how the place of the body changes in time of crises.
Other voices have also emerged, marking a shift in her approach. “I have this need to listen to those in my pictures, to interview them and get closer… I realized that it wasn’t about documenting what I feel and how I see things. The revolution isn’t mine alone, it is the revolution of every person in the picture. It’s not just what I want to say to their image.” There’s a melancholy to these images, but not the typical anonymity that characterizes her former work.
Compare this to Boulos’ seductive series Nightshift, in which she captures the dark glamor of nocturnal life in Beirut’s industrial districts and underground clubs. “I wasn’t close to the people I photographed at those parties. In a way I feel more comfortable with strangers,” she explains. “Strangers don’t put you in a box or label you, because they don’t know you. You can be, like, whoever you are in the moment.”
Her camera withholds what is on the other side of the lens, the urban fabric projecting and mirroring her own desires as she gains access to Beirut’s interstitial spaces. Dead End is another series with undertones of oblivion. Individual dreams for urban space become a collective body of longing. There’s something of Nan Goldin in these photographs, but without the drug culture.
In one shot, Beirut’s blushed sky framed by a car window gleams a burnt orange, sublime in its separation from the glass pane. “I started de-contextualizing and de-objectifying things in Dead End. Even though objectification has negative connotations, it was a need for me, in order to appropriate the city,” Boulos says.
A photograph removed from its context indicates a larger, surrounding narrative that is absent. “News from Lebanon is largely disseminated through Western voices and I'm lucky to be able to show my tiny local point of view globally,” she says. Just as the virality of Boulos’ work has exposed her to a level of cyber-bullying, so too have her street encounters subjected her to unwanted attention from people, sometimes from those she would least expect it, such as Ahmad, a male volunteer praying in a gutted building in Mar Mikhaël, whose image was published in Time magazine.
“I always take the phone number of the people I photograph and Ahmad wasn’t the only one who harassed me. It’s funny in Lebanon because we document and we fight. There are no boundaries. This year, we fought for our basic rights; and sexism and racism became less important. I feel like the second step of the revolution is to fight for all of these issues together, equally.”
Now that there is a lull in the storm, Myriam Boulos is returning to her research on the city as a container for human urges and self-estrangement. Her next project will investigate women’s fantasies. Time creates space from the tumult. It also enables the artist to journey away from—and towards—a wounded city, without ever encapsulating it fully. As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida, “We constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but we destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but we restore it to a state which is still mystified.”
