What’s Ours

On October 13th, 2019, the photographer Myriam Boulos looked out from her balcony and sensed that something was afoot. There was, she knew, a general air of instability—throughout Lebanon, people struggled to access basic services like water, electricity, and sanitation—but later she would come to realize that she was also intuiting a newly unfolding catastrophe: At that very moment, wildfires were erupting across the nation’s forests. Four days later, as government neglect stalled containment and recovery efforts, the Lebanese cabinet announced new financial measures, among them legislation that further insulated the wealthy. Protests broke out, inaugurating a series of uprisings against the state’s fatal austerity and corruption. “It felt as if we were coming out of an abusive relationship to finally say: No, this is not normal,” Boulos writes of the events that would eventually be known as the October 17 Revolution. “Since then, everything has been emotionally and physically draining and confusing but also beautiful, sad and awakening.”

For Boulos, the revolutionary moment instigated a way of seeing, dilating the vivid contradictions that animate social worlds in the midst of radical transformation. What’s Ours—a series of photographs taken between 2013 and 2023 and collected into a book of the same name (Aperture, 2023)—realizes the possibilities of this form of perception. In sensuous and caustic images, Boulos documents the multifariousness of contemporary life in Lebanon. The project’s titular insistence on populist solidarity, however, should not be mistaken for didactic certainty: “Lebanon is so fragmented . . . that I personally have trouble grasping what us refers to,” Boulos explained in an interview. Indeed, What’s Ours juxtaposes such markedly discrepant scenes as a stripper suspended upside-down on a pole at a nightclub, a group of soldiers gazing at something just outside the image’s frame, masked women walking away from a burning building, and the hands of the artist and her grandmother lovingly entwined.

Across the series, Boulos develops a visual vocabulary through which meaning is thrown up for grabs. In one image, hundreds of men stretch their hands toward the night sky, confetti filling the air. They appear to be taking part in a celebration—but because Boulos shows us this photograph alongside depictions of militarized repression and popular uprising, the otherwise carefree scene assumes a layer of gravitas: The gold glitter falling from the sky rhyme with the debris from explosions; the coordinated gestures of the revelers recall other cohorts engaged in forms of choreographed sociality, like soldiers or protesters. In another image, a cloud of hookah smoke obscuring the face of a man lounging on a lawn chair recalls the haze of tear gas. Like the uprisings themselves, these images probe the porous boundaries between everyday life and ruptural transformation.

But while harsher references persist across the series, a tenacious tenderness emerges as the dominant note. Consider the astonishing portrait of a young woman posing in front of a blown-out window. She is wearing a mask—perhaps to protect herself from Covid-19, or from toxic chemicals emanating from the ruined city visible in the background. What strikes me is not the debris of Beirut, but the sybaritic quality produced by the rich interplay of textural and chromatic elements: the folds of the woman’s soft, pink trousers; the smoothness of her white tank top against her tan shoulders; the delicate tattoos decorating her bare arms; the jagged, beige rubble of the city. Like so many of Boulos’s images, this portrait registers the thick experience of revolutionary time.

The photographs in What’s Ours cannot be reduced to a unified meaning. Here there is no singular subject, no figure on high to prescribe the coming future. Instead, these pictures harness the throbbing urgency of riots and raves, immersing the viewer in a rapturous present tense, where all manner of transgressions—queer intimacy, state repression, imperial violence—jostle in recombinant relation. Where Boulos refuses the illusory comfort of a salvific authority, she offers in its place an affirmation of what we make together, consecrating, again and again, the promise of human connection. Every revolution, after all, begins and ends with the body.