Gabriel Hill is a commercial portraiture photographer based in Basel, Switzerland, who usually pays the bills by taking headshots of bigwigs in the thriving pharmaceutical business. But a new personal passion project is fast finding a cult audience around the world. ImPortraits is a series of photos of people with very little, documenting refugees who escaped their countries carrying only a handful of essentials – or nothing at all.

With Hill’s studio located beside an accommodation centre for refugees in Switzerland, he was struck by the sight of men and women affected by different crises around the world. Wanting to help, he conceived the idea of an ongoing project which involves him taking photographs of refugees with their most precious object, more often than not the only one they managed to escape with.

You can look at some of the images from the ImPortraits project in the gallery below and find out more about the featured refugees' stories on the website: