I Believe / A portrait of Bressoux

• Prize
• Photographer
  HJ Hunter, Netherlands
• Studio
  Visto Studio
• Socials
• Website
  https://www.hjhunter.photography

'I Believe’ is a portrait of Bressoux, a multireligious suburb of Liège
in Belgium. To me Bressoux is the world in a nutshell. Muslims live
together with Kurds, Jezidi’s, Italians, African Christians and Syrian
Orthodox on less then a square mile. It’s a crossroad of European,
Arabic and African cultures. Each ethnic group has its own church, its own community center or its own café. Living in a time of worldwide religious international conflicts, I became curious how all these people manage to live together. The result of this ongoing project will be a multimedia documentary on a website, where still and moving images, text and sound are used to tell the stories of the place, the communities and the individuals.
In this series we see a Moroccan family celebrating the festival of Sacrifice, which ends with a children's playground at the mosque Al-Itissam.

• Biography
  I studied literature and had a professional career in journalistic and commercial writing, before I became a documentary photographer. I studied photography with Forum Beeldtaal and the Fotoacademy. My autonomous projects were internationally exhibited and published in The Guardian, Trouw, De Volkskrant, De Limburger, De Standaard, De Morgen and magazines like Dodho, Focus and Pf. Most of my projects deal with current social themes. My first photo book 'Once upon a time' (2023, Lecturis) is a portrait of the post-industrial heart of Western Europe.