Myriam Boulos
A Collective Diary: Sexual Fantasies
Foam presents the first museum solo exhibition of Lebanese photographer Myriam Boulos, recipient of the 19th Foam Paul Huf Award. Bringing together an intimate and deeply personal body of work made in her hometown of Beirut. Boulos turns her camera towards the spaces, bodies and intimate encounters that exist beyond the immediately visible. Her photographs explore sexuality, desire and fantasy, while reflecting on the ways bodies and land are shaped by systems of power and oppression.
About the exhibition
The exhibition brings together selected works from several series: Looking for tenderness, What’s ours, Sexual fantasies and Fragments of a collective diary in times of war. Together, these works unfold as a personal diary, composed of intimate observations and personal notes from the artist’s life and surroundings. Her photographs emerge from personal relationships built on trust, friendship and intimacy. In her work, intimacy becomes a space of resistance: a way of reclaiming the image and redirecting repressive gazes toward the strength of inner desires, resistance and freedom in circumstances shaped by violence and oppression.
The exhibition offers a glimpse into Boulos’ inner world and the intimate lives of those around her. Through her photographs, she gives space to desires and sexual fantasies often hidden away and associated with shame. Existing within the imagination, fantasies can offer a space of freedom, curiosity and possibility, without causing harm. For Boulos, it is the violence that exists beyond the imagination that demands closer scrutiny: the forms of oppression and brutality that have become so normalised. Her images bring the private and political, the imagined and lived, into proximity, liberating experiences of tenderness, desire and resistance.
About the artist
Myriam Boulos was born in 1992 in Lebanon. At the age of 16, 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 both national and international group 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 Magazine, Time, GQ Middle East, Vogue Arabia, and Vanity Fair France, among other publications. In 2021 she was named a Foam Talent and joined Magnum as a nominee. In 2023, her book What’s Ours was published by Aperture and she was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Fellowship. In 2026 Boulos photographed the campaign for Harry Styles for his Together, Together world tour.
About the Foam Paul Huf Award
Myriam Boulos is the 19th winner of the Foam Paul Huf Award. This is an internationally acclaimed photography prize. It is awarded to artists whose creative vision speaks to our current time and makes a significant contribution to today's photographic community. The award is open to artists from all nationalities working in documentary, journalistic and fashion photography. The award is organised by Foam since 2007 and is awarded to photographers by an international independent professional jury. Previous winners include multimedia artist Hiền Hoàng (2024), artist Felipe Romero Beltrán (2023) and artist Lebohang Kganye (2022).
The Foam Paul Huf Award is made possible by Mentha.