ANTHONY SAROUFIM (LES INDISCIPLINÉS)

The photographs are not taken from a distance. They are produced from within the scene, among friends and strangers, bodies in motion, moments of excess, tenderness, boredom, desire, and collapse. The camera is present, acknowledged, and negotiated. What unfolds is shaped by proximity rather than direction, by shared presence rather than staging.

Set in Beirut, the work turns away from polished nightlife imagery and commercial spectacle to focus on the margins: private apartments, after-hours bars, transient encounters, and the fragile intimacy that surfaces when the city lowers its guard. In a place where public behavior is closely monitored, the night functions as a temporary truce, a narrow window in which bodies test visibility, closeness, and restraint before daylight reasserts control.

The human body appears not as an ideal, but as a site of tension. It is exposed, playful, vulnerable, sometimes reckless. Pleasure is never neutral here; it carries risk, urgency, and contradiction. To be seen, to touch, to desire, to let go, these gestures register as provisional acts, shaped by context and consequence.

LES INDISCIPLINÉS does not aim to define Beirut’s nightlife or to document it exhaustively. It gathers fragments instead, unstable moments made possible by trust, proximity, and the conditions of the night itself. Freedom, when it appears, is brief and unresolved, felt most intensely because it is never guaranteed.

Courtesy Galerie Tanit, Beyrouth/Munich.