When Harry Styles Met Myriam Boulos

When Harry Styles announced his global tour last month, the news flooded social media, delighting his zealous fan base. A series of closely cropped photographs of passionately smooching couples accompanied the tour announcement—images that will soon grace streetcars, bus stops, and other public spaces in cities on the tour. The photographs, with their electric intimacy, are instantly recognizable as the work of Myriam Boulos. 

Michael Famighetti: Congratulations on this project with Harry Styles. How did this campaign for his global tour come about?

Myriam Boulos: It all started with an email sent by Harry Styles’s creative director, who told me that she works for “a major pop star who’s fallen very in love” with my work. A month later, the campaign was out! She later told me that Styles initially saw my book What’s Ours, published by Aperture in 2023, and loved the cover photograph.

Famighetti: You have a knack for getting people to be comfortable doing intimate things in front of the camera. How do you approach this?

Boulos: For me, the moment of a picture is similar to any other encounter. Kindness and bienveillance (being well-intentioned) come before anything else. It’s important for things to be clear from the beginning, for people in the images to know what to expect, to be informed, to be able to tell me what they are comfortable with or not, and, most importantly, to share agency in the image-making. This automatically creates a safe context where we can all allow ourselves to be more vulnerable. I cried during one of the sessions!

Famighetti: Where did you make the photographs?

Boulos: The team was just me and Gabriel Ferneini, a documentary photographer who supported me with the production. We took all the images at his apartment in Beirut. This made the whole experience even more safe and intimate.

Famighetti: Did people have different kissing styles?

Boulos: I love this question! There were so many different kissing styles. Passionate, tender, performative, in love, post-breakup, shy, intense, all in the best ways.

Famighetti: What are some of your favorite artworks featuring a kiss?

Boulos: Definitely Hashem El Madani’s kiss pictures. Nan Goldin’s kiss pictures too—that goes without saying. One of my first inspirations in photography was Tom Wood’s pictures of love and tenderness. I also love Sofiya Loriashvili’s self-portraits of her kissing love dolls! And Romy Alizée’s self-portraits exploring her fantasies. And I’ll end this list with the Lebanese photographer Mayssa El Khoury’s self-portrait of her kissing her grandmother.

Famighetti: What’s on your playlist these days?

Boulos: Here’s an unfiltered, messy answer:

Sean Nicholas Savage, “Disco Dancing”
Blonde Redhead, “Misery Is a Butterfly”
Harry Styles, “As It Was” (I listened to this song on loop for two years. I think I manifested this collaboration!)
The Smiths, “I Don’t Owe You Anything”
LUMI, “Not Our War,” “Banging in the Stars,” and “Staying Here”
Björk, “Unravel”
Ghassan Kanafani, “A Conversation Between the Sword and the Neck”