Love immigrants, hate tourists

Eric De Mildt produces intimate images of rail travellers at Brussels' stations, catching them contemplating books, text messages or the departure screens. He makes a virtue of low light to produce atmospheric, grainy shots. One of the best uses reflections in the windows at North Station to build up layers in the image, bringing together people in the train, on the platform and on the descending a staircase.

Dieter Telemans makes warm portraits of first-generation immigrants, posing them in their homes or work places. These range from Lisa Pjetri, who fled Albania in 1952 and appears only with a small snapshot of her family in her hands, to Dimitrios Kynoyalas and his wife, in a front room full of souvenirs of his time working as a miner. There are also more recent arrivals from Burundi, Pakistan and Ecuador, all with tales to tell of family happiness and business success.

Alain Schroeder also brings out the diversity of the capital, with his pictures of religious and cultural celebrations. There are worshippers at a church in the Matonge African quarter, a Turkish wedding and circumcision, people in the street and in restaurants. In a similar vein, Jan Locus has photographed 15 people called Mohammed, apparently now the most common first name in Brussels. This includes the star of the exhibition poster, six-year-old Mohammed El Kbiach, or "Spiderman in his spare time".

A starker side of Brussels can be seen in the pictures of Nick Hannes. He takes us inside the slum apartments of Molenbeek and the Marollen, where people on the margins of society pay over the odds for damp, run down accommodation. Another lives in a squash court, part of an abandoned sports centre, while a makeshift shelter outside bizarrely incorporates a tarpaulin printed with an image from a graphic novel. Even the shanties here are typically Belgian.

All of these photographers appear to sympathise with the people whose lives they are documenting, and, even in the most difficult cases, the images are respectful and non-judgemental. But several of the photographers have projects that strike me as unsympathetic, or downright hostile. This feeling is particularly strong in the section of the exhibition that mixes up pictures by different photographers so that positive and negative images hang side by side.

So who do we hate? First of all, tourists. Taking the lowest common denominator of Brussels tourism, Tim Dirven has based his project around the Manneken Pis, snapping tourists near the urinating icon and the various incarnations of it that appear around town. This is accompanied by a contemptuous text by journalist Catherine Vuylsteke, headlined "fast food for the imagination", which condemns visitors for their lack of inquiry into the origins of the statue and its ambiguous authenticity. "They probably don't care," it concludes. And Belgians do?

However you have to hand it to Dirven. He sums up of the tourist cliché perfectly with a larger than life image of an Asian woman with a huge camera in one hand (perversely shooting away from the Manneken Pis) and a vast chocolate covered waffle in the other.

Another group that we are meant to despise are the Eurocrats. The images constructed by Philippe Herbet epitomise the faceless bureaucrat, as he carefully shoots people from behind or focuses on the empty rooms and corridors of the European Commission. The couple of images that do show people head on (which only appear in the book and not the exhibition) are simply labelled "EU staff" rather than giving them a name and a nationality, still less a personal story. The selection is titled "Brussels without Belgians", forgetting that Belgians are as well, if not better, represented in the EU institutions as any other nation.

Hostility closer to home is directed at people around wellheeled Zavel in photos taken by Jimmy Kets, and the out-andout privileged at the International Club Chateau Saint-Anne at Auderghem by Wim Knapen. These are easy targets, lazily photographed. More surprising is a selection on bourgeois bohemian Brussels by Marine Dricot, described in the text as divided into Dansaert Flemish and Chatelaine French speakers. Like the pictures of Eurocrats these, photographs turn their subjects into faceless bodies, not in over-exposed offices but dark bars and apartments. The irony is that of all the Brussels communities, this is probably the one to which most of the photographers belong.

Facing Brussels
Until 12 September
BELvue Museum
Paleizenplein 7, Brussels
www.belvue.be