My images examine the relationship between the individual and their surrounding environment. Beauty, desire and freedom each word features as a subtle backdrop to my portraits of young professional British Muslims. I hope that my images introduce a contemporary twist on traditional Islamic art.
  Rehan Jamil

Rehan Jamil lives in East London and began his photographic career at the age of 17 by taking photographs for local newspaper, ‘The East End Enterprise’. He has since continued as a freelance photographer producing documentary images relating to South Asian lives in Britain. As a recipient of a ‘Leaders for London Millennium Award', he produced work for the book, Common Ground: Portraits of Tower Hamlets (1998), which documented the physical landscape and thriving community within the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

His work was exhibited at the group show 000ZEROZEROZERO at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1999) and the Station Gallery, Frankfurt (2000). Apart from providing editorial images as a contract photographer for a number of large urban regeneration programmes, Rehan is currently working on a long-term project relating to the Muslim Community in Tower Hamlets and their lives around the East London Mosque. The mosque’s expansion will qualify it as being the largest (capacity) purpose built mosque in Europe. He recently produced images in Palestine and Afghanistan documenting the daily struggle for people living in conflict zones

Images produced by Rehan for the ‘Patient & Public Health’ booklet commissioned by the NHS were nominated for a Nursing Times Award in 2002, the work was also named by the CRE in 2003 as one of eleven examples of good practice from the entire UK public sector, this lead to a National project funded by the Prime Minister's Office of Public Services Reform.

Work by Rehan has been included in the group exhibition Common Ground (2003) commissioned by The British Council the images explore Muslim identity in the UK. His work was also included in the Changing Faces O2 exhibition (2003), which catalogued the diverse British Asian presence in youth culture.

Rehan Jamil describes himself as a social documentary photographer who is primarily concerned with communities in transition.