The Wider Field

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. This is a map of that terrain, as I understand it, and of where my own work sits on it. It’s not a ranking. Most of these people I’ve never met.

Refugee photography that begins after arrival

The classic refugee photograph is an event: the boat, the border, the camp, the rescue. Much of the most interesting recent work refuses to end there, and instead begins where that picture usually stops.

César Dezfuli photographed 118 people minutes after they were rescued from a single boat in the Mediterranean, then spent years finding the same people across Europe and photographing the lives they went on to build. Tobias Zielony’s The Citizen portrayed African refugee activists in Berlin and Hamburg as political actors rather than humanitarian subjects, and published the pictures alongside texts by African writers in newspapers in the protagonists’ own countries — reversing the direction in which images of refugees usually travel. Henk Wildschut photographs the improvised homes people build in Calais rather than their faces: a kettle, a constructed wall, a bedroom made from nothing.

Come Get Your Honey belongs to this group. It was made in Berlin, after arrival, among friendships. What sets it apart inside that group is only that its subject is queer life — the pictures are about desire, chosen family, nightlife, domestic rooms and gender, not about displacement as a spectacle.

The camera handed over

A second direction gives the camera to the people being photographed. Sahat Zia Hero, who fled Myanmar in 2017 and lives in the Kutupalong settlement, founded Rohingyatographer — a collective of more than thirty Rohingya photographers, writers and artists documenting their own community. Robin Hammond’s Witness Change runs 1000 Dreams, in which more than a hundred storytellers with refugee backgrounds are trained to photograph and interview other refugees, under the principle “about refugees, by refugees.” Hammond’s earlier Where Love Is Illegal made portraits of LGBTQ+ people persecuted and often forced to flee, on the subjects’ own terms, with their testimonies alongside.

I sit partly here too, through my own biography rather than through method. I’m a first-generation immigrant, and queer, and the people in the book are friends. The relationship came before every photograph. But I did hold the camera, and I don’t want to claim a redistribution of authorship that I didn’t actually make.

Queer forced migration, from the other end of the route

Bradley Secker has spent more than a decade on LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and refugees from Syria, Iran and Iraq, much of it in Turkey — the country of first asylum for many of the people who later reach Germany. His work is the most direct thematic neighbour to mine, from the opposite end of the same journey. Ashkan Shabani’s Queer, Life, Freedom: Archive of Resilience, shown at Kampnagel in Hamburg, maps a three-country exile from Iran through Turkey into German refugee accommodation, through photography, text and installation — an archive built from inside the experience rather than observed from outside it.

Queer photography in Germany

There is also a lineage here that has nothing to do with migration and everything to do with how queer intimacy gets photographed at all. Wolfgang Tillmans’ unframed, pinned pictures put a portrait of a lover on the same footing as a still life, and presented queer friendship and non-conforming gender as ordinary lived reality — a way of seeing that almost every younger photographer of queer everyday life in Germany now works inside, whether they know it or not. Sven Marquardt photographed friends and muses in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg in the 1980s, under a regime where looking different meant surveillance, and became the link between the GDR queer underground and Berlin’s club culture. Florian Hetz photographs male bodies in extreme close-up, almost never faces, and argues through that framing that queer sexuality deserves the same visual ordinariness as anyone else’s. Spyros Rennt’s self-published books are a longitudinal archive of a Berlin generation growing older together. DeLovie Kwagala, from Kampala and now in Berlin, makes work on migration, belonging and intimacy that refuses to fetishise or victimise the Black and queer bodies in it.

When the curator Marianne Ager placed Come Get Your Honey in the lineage of Nan Goldin and Christer Strömholm — intimate queer social portraiture, with asylum as the political context around it — she was placing it in this tradition. I’m grateful for the company.

Turning the apparatus on itself

One more direction, and the one furthest from mine: work that makes the act of looking the subject. Richard Mosse turned a military thermal camera, built for border surveillance, on the routes through the Middle East and Europe, so that the viewer sits in the seat of the surveillance operator. Gideon Mendel, in Calais, after residents made clear they did not want to be photographed — many feared a recognisable picture could damage an asylum claim — stopped photographing people and began collecting and studio-photographing the objects left in the mud and ash: fifty-nine toothbrushes in a grid, worn shoes, a child’s doll.

I don’t work this way, but I understand why they do. The question underneath all of it is the same one that started my book: who is looking at whom, and what relationship exists before the photograph is made. I came to the answer through listening. Others came to it through refusal, or through handing the camera over. The field is wider than any one of us, and better for it.

The series is here. The plainer account of what it is and who it involved is here.