Field guides
Come Get Your Honey doesn't stand alone. Four field guides on where it sits — among photographers of forced migration, queer refugee photographers in Germany, queer photographers in Germany more broadly, and emerging queer photographers worldwide.
A body of work about queer refugees in Berlin can start to feel, from inside it, like the only one of its kind. It isn’t, and I’d rather say so. Other photographers have been working near the same questions for years — some in Germany, some elsewhere, some from the other end of the same routes, some on queerness with no migration in the picture at all. I’ve written it up as four separate maps rather than one long list, because the four questions are genuinely different ones, and because “Samet Durgun and twelve others” is a worse way to read any of this than just reading about the twelve.
None of it is a ranking, and I’ve tried to hold a real bar for it: a photographer’s identity or a factual claim about their work only appears here where I could actually stand behind it, not where a first pass of research happened to turn it up. Most of these people I’ve never met.
Photographers working on refugees, forced migration and asylum → The widest frame — from photographers who begin after the boat and the border rather than at them, to work that hands the camera to the people it’s about, to work that turns the apparatus of looking into the subject itself. Where Come Get Your Honey sits inside a tradition much bigger than Berlin.
Queer refugee photographers in Germany → Narrow it to Germany specifically, and the field gets small fast. The photographers working, right now, at the actual intersection of queerness, asylum and daily life here — some through relationship and biography, some grown out of counselling and advocacy work, some as long-form documentary from outside.
Queer photographers from and based in Germany → Step back from migration entirely: the much larger lineage of German and Germany-based photographers who’ve spent decades figuring out how to photograph queer life at all, from Wolfgang Tillmans and Sven Marquardt through to the generation working now. This is the lineage my own work sits inside as much as the one about refugees.
Emerging queer photographers worldwide → Past Germany altogether — a generation of queer photographers early in their careers, working across six continents on migration, family, faith, land and the body. I’m one entry in this field, not a special case inside it.
The series itself is here. The plainer account of what Come Get Your Honey is and who it involved is here.