‘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.