‘The voice of the bombs scares me a lot,’ Mariama Fofanah told the Beirut-born photographer Myriam Boulos, who set up a small studio in a shelter where migrant workers from Sierra Leone found fleeting respite in the wake of the Israeli war on Lebanon. By September 2024 the assault had already produced a gruesome catalogue of images: the carefree detonation of entire villages, hands with missing fingers from pager attacks, moon-like craters where bunker bombs had reduced buildings and their inhabitants to dust, which filled the nostrils of the survivors. One of the most indelible images of the invasion was a variation on an already cemented genre, mock-the-victim photography, in the tradition of Abu Ghraib: a group of smiling Israeli soldiers pose, as if for a class reunion picture, with a large photograph of an elderly Lebanese woman which they have looted from an apartment. What to do as a photographer in a war where even simple family portraits have become trophies?

Boulos asked herself how to document the destruction in Lebanon, particularly the plight of those displaced by Israeli forces: ‘Many photojournalists have been photographing people on the streets, sleeping or awake, stripped of any privacy or agency,’ Boulos told Granta. ‘A man in front of Ramlet El Bayda told me he would beat up anyone who tried to photograph him.’ By November the death toll exceeded 3,000, with more than 185 children killed.

Boulos visited a shelter established by her sister and sister in law’s friend, Déa Hage-Chahine, who had put up tents for domestic staff whose employers’ homes were no longer habitable. The easy way to look at these women is as double victims: first, as the cogs of the kafala system in Lebanon which has cycled migrant labor through its society for seventy years, exchanging basic rights in return for employment at the whim of ‘sponsors’; second, as targets for Israeli forces.

Boulos wanted to register this double violence in a different way. She set up her camera, draped colored fabric for a background, and invited the women to be photographed however they wished to be represented. The direct Speedlight flash would not only illuminate faces, but also accentuate the immediacy and tentative relief of people taking a pause on the run from destruction. The mayhem in Lebanon was momentarily suppressed as hands were put on hips, elbows casually rested on companions’ shoulders, and children were lovingly fed. One woman seeking a haven, Aminata, helped Boulos record names and accounts of displacement. Conversations started haltingly, then flowed. To be in the position of granting a modicum of agency to people beaten into a corner provokes its own set of questions, but the point for Boulos was to register that this, too, was part of the war: on top of an old injustice there squatted a suffocating, engineered emergency. People who had made the long journey from Freetown to Beirut to make a little money were lucky to be returning home with their lives.

Thank you to Kadiatou Kamara, Mariama Fofanah, Mariatu Kabila, Adama Koroma, Kadiatu Tu Ray, Mariam Kamara, Fatmata Bai Koroma, Kumba Kamara, Maryisatu Koroma, Musu Kanu, Mariatu Swariay and her son Mohammad.

Introduction by Granta