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, largely 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. 

A Collective Diary: Sexual Fantasies brings together several series, including Looking for Tenderness, What’s Ours, Sexual Fantasies and Fragments of a Collective Diary in Times of War. In What’s Ours, she explores how people and land are shaped by systems of power and subjugation, such as military aggression, while Looking for Tenderness focuses on the oppression of patriarchy and masculinity. Throughout Boulos’ work, intimacy becomes a space of resistance: a way of reclaiming the image and redirecting repressive gazes toward the strength of desires, resistance. 

The exhibition unfolds as a collective diary composed of photographs, intimate observations, personal notes and the voices of people the artist encounters, where Boulos gives particular attention to the series Sexual Fantasies. It offers a glimpse into Boulos’ inner world and the intimate lives of those around her. By making space for desires and fantasies often hidden or associated with shame, her work brings the private and political, the imagined and lived, closer together.  

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 collective exhibitions, including Close Enough at ICP, New York; Infinite Identities at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; and Troisième Biennale des Photographes du Monde Arabe, at l’Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. Her work has been published in Aperture, Foam Magazine, Time, GQ Middle East, Vogue Arabia, and Vanity Fair France, among other publications. In 2020, Boulos co-founded and became the photo editor of Al Hayya, a bilingual magazine that publishes literary and visual content on the works, interests and strife of women in her region. 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 Foam Paul Huf Award

The Foam Paul Huf Award is an internationally acclaimed photography prize aiming to support generational talents and provide a platform for photographers from across the world. Foam, with the help of an international and independent jury, has rewarded young photographers with this prize every year since 2007. The members of the 2025 jury of Foam Paul Huf Award are John Fleetwood (Chair of jury, South Africa/Netherlands), Aïda Muluneh (Ethiopia), Moshe Rosenzveig (Australia), Mikhael Subotzky (South Africa) and Johan Trujillo Argüelles (Mexico).  

The Foam Paul Huf Award consists of a prize of €20.000,- and a solo exhibition at Foam. Myriam Boulos sees her name added to an impressive list of 18 former winners, including Felipe Romero Beltrán, Lebohang Kganye, Eric Gyamfi, Daisuke Yokota, Alex Prager and Pieter Hugo, among others. The 20th winner will be announced on 12 November 2026.

The exhibition A Collective Diary: Sexual Fantasies can be seen from 23 October 2026 – 20 January 2027 at Foam.

Foam is open daily 10.00 – 18.00 hrs, Thurs/Fri 10.00 – 21.00 hrs.

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