The long road to being seen: one photographer's 90-day quest to portray what Muslim America really looks like

There's a particular kind of vision only photographers seem to possess. The conviction that if you drive far enough, knock on enough doors, and press the shutter often enough, you can make a country reveal itself.

Robert Frank did it. Dorothea Lange did it. Now British photographer Mahtab Hussain is preparing to do it with a 90-day road trip across America, and he's asking the public to help fund it.

The project is called Muslims in America, and Hussain has been building it since 2021, when he began photographing Muslim communities across six cities: Toronto, New York, LA, Baltimore, Syracuse and Dearborn, Michigan. The work combines formal portraits with video interviews, giving each sitter space to speak plainly about faith, identity and what it feels like to grow up or grow old in a country that has, since 9/11, often regarded Islam with suspicion.

The resulting images are striking precisely because they resist the obvious. There's a Dearborn police officer in hijab. A tattooed Afghan-American actor. A halal barbecue chef who dreams about spice combinations in his sleep. A convert from Nevada who says her blonde hair confuses people into assuming she cannot possibly be Muslim.

Emerging from the shadow

"With 9/11, a long shadow fell," Hussain says. "For years, many Muslims felt they needed to be invisible to survive. But two decades on, a new generation is not hiding."

That's the conceptual heart of the work, and it explains why the road trip matters as much as the images themselves. Hussain describes the series as a "collective self-portrait," and those words are chosen carefully. These are not documents. They are collaborations. The sitters, as he puts it, are co-authors.

The road trip, planned for 18 June to 16 September, will take Hussain from South Paterson, New Jersey (home to Arab-American communities settled since the 19th century) through Islamberg, a rural Muslim hamlet in upstate New York founded in the 1980s, down to Islamville in South Carolina, across to Houston's fast-growing Latino Muslim community, out to the Grand Canyon and finally north to Vancouver.

The itinerary in itself has something profound to say: Islam in America is not one thing, not one ethnicity, not one geography.

For photographers, meanwhile, there's a lot to admire in Hussain's methodology. He works across stills, video and audio, building each portrait into something closer to an archive than a single image. He's also frank about the practical challenge of the form. Portraiture at this scale requires extraordinary levels of trust, and trust requires time. Ninety days, dozens of communities, hundreds of potential sitters: the logistics alone are formidable.

Crowdfunding rewards

Which brings us to the Kickstarter. Hussain launches his crowdfunding campaign on 18 April, running for 30 days, and the rewards are well-considered. At the higher end sits a limited portfolio of 30 giclée prints on Canson Platine Fiber Rag, cloth-bound and signed, in an edition of 12.

There's also a limited-edition journal of 250 copies, combining road trip diary entries with finished portraits, published with London art book house Bemojake. The first public showing of the completed work – a digital projection – is planned for December, with a children's book and exhibitions to follow.

The Kickstarter campaign opens 18 April 18 2026 at kickstarter.com. Learn more about the project at mahtabhussain.com.