Sexual Fantasies
In her ongoing series, Myriam Boulos unpacks themes of sexuality, desire, and fantasy from Beirut and beyond.
In 2021, Beirut-based Myriam Boulos sent out an open call via her social media channels: “If you identify as a woman or you have been socialized as a woman, and you want to share your sexual fantasies, send me an e-mail.”
At the time, Boulos was working on her debut photobook What’s Ours, a personal and political depiction of Beirut post-revolution. Energetic, loud, but with an underlying intimacy, her photographs form a diary of a city and a population in motion.
What’s Ours became a step to reclaim her own story — to shape her own narrative. “The title refers to anyone who is fighting any type of normalized oppression. Family, friends and strangers…” she wrote in an interview with Dazed in 2023. “As an Arab woman, I always try to deconstruct photography’s colonial and patriarchal practice and to challenge the conventional ways of representing our region in photography.”
Her open call in 2021 to friends and followers was the beginning of a new series, now titled Sexual Fantasies. “I have been wanting to explore sexual fantasies since I discovered my own, a few years ago,” she writes in the series description. “At the time, patriarchy was invading and occupying the most personal corners of my life, and sexual fantasies became a space in which I could reclaim myself.”
"This project is a way of taking up space within the universes and desires that we are taught to hide. Trying to get rid of shame. "
- Myriam Boulos
Pleasure, desire, and sexuality are all themes that remain deeply taboo, not only in Lebanon, but across the world, especially for women, queer, trans, and marginalized communities. Sexual Fantasies now ignores all notion of this taboo, tackling the themes head-on, with a series of direct, frank portraits and screenshots of the emails that she received, the names barred out. “I knew there was a shared interest, desire, and need to talk about this,” she explains now. “I had been talking about sex and sexual fantasies with friends, acquaintances and sometimes strangers for years before starting this project.”
“In my twenties, a friend offered me a vibrator for my birthday (I spent the day in bed masturbating). I started questioning my fantasies, the place of patriarchy in these fantasies, and the notion of pain,” she says now. “Sexual fantasies became a space in which I could deconstruct and play with everything that can actually hurt us in real life. This project is a way of taking up space within the universes and desires that we are taught to hide. Trying to get rid of shame. Dealing with trauma that used our sexuality as a playground. I see sexual fantasies as a medium to explore many things, a bit like photography.”
Expanding from Beirut to other cities in the world, Boulos continued to converse with, and photograph, the people that would reach out to her. For many, the process of opening up and sharing their fantasies was a way to regain control of their sexuality, and the stories surrounding it. It became a space for people to talk about themselves shamelessly, ignoring completely the confines created by the male gaze, and selflessly, bracing for the inevitable backlash in order to empower other women to be able to do the same.
"I remember the first person I photographed telling me she felt represented rather than being exposed. This stayed with me. "
- Myriam Boulos
In parallel to What’s Ours, Sexual Fantasies uses photography as a way to transfer ownership of stories back to the people they belong to. “I remember the first person I photographed telling me she felt represented rather than being exposed,” she recalls. “This stayed with me.”
“I want to take this whole world we all have inside of us and make it visible,” she explained in an interview with the British Journal of Photography. “I wanted to undo this impulse we have as women not to take up space.”
"I wanted to undo this impulse we have as women not to take up space."
- Myriam Boulos
Last summer, the series was displayed at On the Move, a photography festival in Cortona, Italy. The images were printed in large format, and there was a corner dedicated to the e-mail screenshots of sexual fantasies that were sent to her. “The response was very touching in person. I think that people choose to visit an exhibition so they are somehow open and ready to see the work,” Boulos explains.
But the reaction is not always as touching, coming under predictable scrutiny from certain viewers. “The online world is different. Although it can create much-needed magic connections, it sometimes is a space where people are confronted with content they were not expecting. I usually like to caress people with my world, thoughts, and sensitivity. I feel like social media can sometimes be received more like a punch in the face. For example, when I post on my own Instagram page, my followers know what to expect from me. But when pages like Magnum or World Press Photo share Sexual Fantasies, there is a lot of resistance (coming mainly from white men, to be completely honest).”
Sexual Fantasies is a series that unflinchingly lays bare stories that usually remain hidden away, liberating experiences of desire, and beginning to unpack its complex ties to a patriarchal society.
Damascus in the Days Following the Fall of Al-Assad
