After the Eid Al-Fitr prayers which mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan Abed Siddiqi (left) embraces an older man from the Afghan community. The Blacktown Mosque is mostly comprised of Afghans from both the Pashtun and Tajik communities. Eid Al-Fitr is important as it celebrate Muslim's committment to their faith by fasting for a month and attending additional prayer sessions.
As a documentary photographer I have worked on stories with a range of communities in Australia and around the world. Since learning about Afghanistan in university I have had a keen interest in the country and recently I decided the best way to really learn about the country is through Australia’s Afghan community. In late 2014 I decided to crowd fund money to run a participatory visual storytelling workshop for young Afghans and South Sudanese. The project called Seeing Summer successfully raised over $17,000 you can see my blog about it here. This and the current project, Seeing Ramadan, was undertaken in partnership with the Community Migrant Resource Centre, an NGO whose staff provided access to the community and support throughout.
After working on assignment for most of Ramadan I have just returned to Australia for just the last 8 days and set about to photograph the Afghan community during the remaining time. Over the past week I have been up at all hours visiting as many of the Afghan mosques around Sydney, both Shia and Sunni and also covering the three major ethnic groups of the country Hazara, Tajik and Pashtun. In the second part of this photo series there will be photos from young Afghans who answered the call when asked ‘what did you see during Ramadan’.