Two years ago, he was largely unknown, but after winning a F25 grant, the City of Perpignan’s Young Reporter’s Award and a Prix Pictet commission, Munem Wasif has now become one of the most-promising young photographers around. This year, and for the second time in three years, his work is on show at Visa Pour l’Image, the world’s largest photojournalism festival.

His latest project – In God We Trust – is a personal look at Islam, which is practiced by more than 130 million people in Bangladesh. While Wasif has never been of the religious kind, he tells BJP, his experience outside of Bangladesh has pushed him to address his religion. “The world has changed so much since 9/11,” he says. “A young guy like me, with a beard and a Bangladeshi passport, runs into problems anywhere he goes. In Paris, for example, I was taking the Métro. with a backpack and people kept on asking me ‘is it your bag?’ In one café, a waiter told a friend of mine that if I went quickly they would be happier. They didn’t feel comfortable around me.”

The problem, says Wasif, resides in the fact that too many people are close-minded about Islam. “It’s so one-way,” he tells BJP’s news editor Olivier Laurent. “It’s all about the veil, bombs, Afghanistan, Iraq. It’s about a particular side of Islam. In the media, you only see either extreme fundamentalists or western-influenced Muslim upper class people. There’s no middle. It’s black-and-white, and there are no shades of grey.” And, says Wasif, he wanted to change that perception.

“Millions of people living in the US only have Fox News and CNN, and their perceptions are shaped by these news networks. They think the whole world is like that. My point was that I wanted to do a story about Islam that isn’t based on the idea of good or bad. My intention was to show the multiple layers of Islam and even its contradictions – how different people are practicing Islam within Bangladesh.”

Wasif went on to photograph his family and friends, as well as different castes and festivals. “My point was to make it as personal as I could and to show as many layers as I could,” he says. “Even in my family, my father would practice Islam in a different way than my sister. As for me, I didn’t even practice it. So within one family, you have three people who are dealing with the same religion in three different ways.”

In God We Trust is still a work-in-progress, but Wasif is already thinking about his next long-term project. “One thing I’m planning to do is to photograph the youth in Bangladesh,” he reveals. “When we think about Bangladesh, it’s full of stereotypes. It’s either about floods or acid victims. It’ll always be about something terrible, something wrong. But we also have normal lives. When I see my friends, they have quite interesting lives. So I’m planning to do a story on my friends, on this generation in transition. That part of Bangladesh is currently missing in our visual history.”

And, he adds, he doesn’t plan on leaving Bangladesh, not just for practical reasons, but also because he believes that a photojournalist doesn’t need to travel thousands of miles to find compelling stories – “there are so many people in Bangladesh and there are so many stories to tell there.”

Visit Munem Wasif's website.