This article analyses recent photographic practices that make visible underlying realities faced by Western societies today as they struggle to reconcile contradictions between their policies on race, immigration and ethnicity and the quest for an integrated national identity. The main case studies are drawn from the works of Mohamed Bourouissa and Tobias Zielony. The article demonstrates how their photographic projects confront the logic of social and cultural marginalisation of the immigrant communities, which often overlaps with their spatial consignment to urban peripheries. By combining reality and fiction, symbolism and documentation, these projects offer alternatives to the modes of representation available in photojournalism, as well as re-connecting with the genre of street photography.