04 / Portraits & Documentary · Queer newcomers · Belonging · Everyday life
Q Kitchen
Portraits and community
Q Kitchen is a place of safety, joy and connection for queer refugees and newcomers to the Netherlands, and for the wider community around them. Around food, conversation, costumes and performance, people make room to play, discover and express who they are. My photographs move between the intimacy of a portrait and the shared life of the gathering.
36 photographs
Read about the project ↓01 / Within the series
Life around the table
Preparing, serving, listening, dressing up and dancing. These photographs follow the everyday care, affection and freedom to play that give the gathering its life.
02 / Within the series
Portraits at Q Kitchen
Individual portraits, couples and friends: a quiet pose, a shared joke, a touch or a theatrical gesture. I draw the energy of the gathering into the portrait.
About the project
A place to find one another.
Q Kitchen offers a safe space for queer refugees and newcomers to the Netherlands, alongside a wider community of friends and supporters. For many, it may be one of the first places where they can feel at ease being themselves.
Here, a meal can become a celebration. Costumes, adornment and performance make room for play and discovery: for trying out ways of being that feel closer to oneself, even if only for a few hours. Joy and quiet affection sit alongside the practical work of cooking, serving and making people welcome.
My photographs move between individual presence and shared life. The portraits and the community photographs form separate sequences, connected by an attention to how people choose to appear, and how they make space for one another. Some of these encounters also developed into The Radical Act of Just Being.
Threads through the work
