# Samet Durgun > Berlin-based photographer and visual artist (b. 1988, Adana). Author of the monograph "Come Get Your Honey" (Kehrer Verlag, 2021), made with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin. Guiding question: what if photography is more about listening than seeing? Site: https://sametdurgun.com Contact: hi@sametdurgun.com Instagram: @hi.sametdurgun (https://www.instagram.com/hi.sametdurgun/) Based in: Berlin, Germany Profiles: https://www.instagram.com/hi.sametdurgun/ · https://www.lensculture.com/samet-durgun · https://www.kehrerverlag.com/en/Samet-Durgun/978-3-96900-031-1 · https://berlin.fotografiska.com/en/exhibitions/samet-durgun · https://criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de/en/samet-durgun-interview/ ## Statement As a first-generation immigrant and queer artist living in Berlin, I've grappled with the question of belonging. I found connection with gender-nonconforming, queer, transgender refugees and asylum seekers in the city, whose intricate identities inspire deep respect in me. My work challenges the traditional view of photography as merely seeing, proposing that it can be more about listening. I seek to capture people in their wholeness, embracing their differences while recognizing the limitations of representation. My images reflect my personal relationships and impressions of their stories, making them a subjective representation of my own experiences. ## The book - Come Get Your Honey — Kehrer Verlag, June 2021 - ISBN 978-3-96900-031-1 · Half-cloth hardcover, 19 × 24 cm · 144 pages, 75 colour illustrations - One voice recording and one video, via QR codes - Essay by Amrou Al-Kadhi; Essay by Marianne Ager; Interview by Prince Emrah - The title comes from Robyn's track “Honey.” - Buy: Kehrer Verlag (https://www.kehrerverlag.com/en/Samet-Durgun/978-3-96900-031-1) · Artsy (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/samet-durgun-come-get-your-honey) - Held by Stanford University Libraries - Page: https://sametdurgun.com/book · Series: https://sametdurgun.com/work/come-get-your-honey - Texts from the book, in full: Foreword, "Foreword", by Amrou Al-Kadhi (https://sametdurgun.com/book/foreword) · Acknowledgements, "Dear Viewer", by Samet Durgun (https://sametdurgun.com/book/dear-viewer) · Interview, "Ask Me Anything", by Prince Emrah & Samet Durgun (https://sametdurgun.com/book/ask-me-anything) · Essay, "Oh, So Beautiful and Complicated!", by Marianne Ager (https://sametdurgun.com/book/oh-so-beautiful-and-complicated) ## Reception - “…with respect and friendship.” — Ulrich Rüter, Leica Fotografie International, Book of the Month (https://lfi-online.de/ceemes/en/blog/samet-durgun-come-get-your-honey-2497.html) - “…camaraderie, intimacy and respect.” — Alona Pardo, LensCulture Critics' Choice 2021 (https://www.lensculture.com/2021-lensculture-critics-choice-award-winners) - “…photography functions like a language that can connect people and communities.” — Maren Lübbke-Tidow, Museum für Fotografie, Berlin (https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/museum-fuer-fotografie/exhibitions/detail/seen-by-15/) ## Exhibitions - 2026 — Gaze and Skin, LANGER Space for Photography, Mannheim, Germany (Group exhibition; curated by Elisa Berdica, Arthur Bauer, Sarah Ungan) — https://sametdurgun.com/exhibitions/gaze-and-skin - 2025 — Come Get Your Honey, Fotografiska Berlin — Emerging Berlin, Berlin, Germany (Solo exhibition; curated by Marie-Luise Mayer) — https://sametdurgun.com/exhibitions/fotografiska-berlin - 2024–25 — Love, Lust and Freedom, Kunstmuseum Brandts, Odense, Denmark (Group exhibition; curated by Marianne Ager) — https://sametdurgun.com/exhibitions/love-lust-and-freedom - 2024 — Off to Elsewhere, Münchner Kammerspiele × Der Greif, Munich, Germany (Poster campaign; curated by Çağla Ilk) — https://sametdurgun.com/exhibitions/off-to-elsewhere - 2021 — Seen By #15: Nothing Ever Happened (Yet), Museum für Fotografie, Berlin, Germany (Group exhibition; curated by Maren Lübbke-Tidow) — https://sametdurgun.com/exhibitions/seen-by-15 ## Selected by curators (Der Greif Guest Room) - 2025 — Felix Hoffmann, Mona Schubert & Marit Lena Herrmann, FOTO ARSENAL WIEN — Der Greif Guest Room “Messy”: undefined (https://dergreif.org/guest-room/felix-hoffmann-mona-schubert--marit-lena-herrmann) - 2023 — Damarice Amao & Matthias Pfaller, Centre Pompidou, Paris — Der Greif Guest Room “Empathy”: undefined (https://dergreif.org/guest-room/damarice-amao--matthias-pfaller) - 2022 — Alfred Weidinger & Maria Venzl, OÖ Landes-Kultur — Der Greif Guest Room: undefined (https://dergreif.org/guest-room/alfred-weidinger) - 2021 — Anika Meier & Max Siedentopf — Der Greif Guest Room: undefined (https://dergreif.org/guest-room/anika-meier) ## Awards - 2021 — LensCulture Critics' Choice Award, selected by Alona Pardo - 2021 — GUP Fresh Eyes talent selection ## Talks (video) - IFA Berlin — speaker — 4–8 September 2026 (https://www.ifa-berlin.com/speakers/samet-durgun) - Artist talk at the opening of Come Get Your Honey, Fotografiska Berlin — with Kylie Divon, moderated by the curator Marie-Luise Mayer (/journal/artist-talk-fotografiska-berlin) - Photobook Fair talk, Impressions Gallery — in conversation with Alexa Becker, Kehrer Verlag (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ia5BLhAfSQ) - Reverse Portfolio Walk, Deutsche Fotografische Akademie — with Karina-Sirkku Kurz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnRK2Fj83Rw) ## Education - BA, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul - Common Ground mentorship, Universität der Künste Berlin, 2020/21 — inaugural edition, class of Mathilde ter Heijne ## Journal - [Individual Presence: A Talk With Kylie Divon at Fotografiska Berlin](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/artist-talk-fotografiska-berlin) — 2026-09-16 - [Emerging Queer Artists Worldwide](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/emerging-queer-artists) — 2026-09-05 - [Queer Artists From and Based in Germany](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-artists-in-germany) — 2026-09-05 - [Queer Refugee Artists in Germany](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-refugee-artists-in-germany) — 2026-09-05 - [Artists Working on Refugees, Forced Migration and Asylum](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/artists-forced-migration-asylum) — 2026-09-05 - [Field guides](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/the-wider-field) — 2026-09-02 - [Emerging Queer Photographers Worldwide](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/emerging-queer-photographers) — 2026-09-02 - [Queer Photographers From and Based in Germany](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-photographers-in-germany) — 2026-09-02 - [Queer Refugee Photographers in Germany](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-refugee-photographers-in-germany) — 2026-09-02 - [Photographers Working on Refugees, Forced Migration and Asylum](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/photographers-forced-migration-asylum) — 2026-09-02 - [Queer Refugee Photography in Berlin](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-refugee-photography-berlin) — 2026-09-02 - [Photography as Listening: A Conversation About Come Get Your Honey](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/photography-as-listening) — 2026-08-31 (with video) - [How Fifty People Became Fifteen Pictures](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/how-fifty-people-became-fifteen-pictures) — 2026-08-31 - [Why the Book Has Audio and Video in It](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/why-the-book-has-audio-and-video) — 2026-08-31 - [Gaze and Skin — LANGER Space for Photography, Mannheim](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/gaze-and-skin-mannheim) — 2026-08-31 - [Come Get Your Honey at Fotografiska Berlin](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/fotografiska-emerging-berlin) — 2026-08-31 - [Mind's War: Memories vs. Epoch](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/minds-war-memories-vs-epoch) — 2023-07-03 - [Photography's Quiet Revolution: Seeing Through Listening](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/photographys-quiet-revolution-seeing-through-listening) — 2023-07-02 - [Soft Activism: The Art of Quiet Transformation](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/soft-activism-the-art-of-quiet-transformation) — 2023-07-01 - [2020s Photography in 6 Principles](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/2020s-photography-in-6-principles) — 2023-06-30 - [Resonations: A New Lens in Artistic Connection](https://sametdurgun.com/journal/resonations-a-new-lens-in-artistic-connection) — 2023-06-29 ## Press - 2025 — Vakuum Magazine, Tenderness as Survival, by Thinley Wingen (https://vakuummagazin.com/stories/fotografiska-samet-durgun/) - 2025 — WhiteWall Magazin, Samet Durgun | Come Get Your Honey — Emerging Berlin feature (German) (https://www.whitewall.com/de/magazin/events/fotografiska) - 2025 — KALTBLUT, Emerging Berlin interview (https://www.kaltblut-magazine.com/fotografiska-berlin-emerging-berlin-samet-durgun-come-get-your-honey/) - 2024 — Dazed, Love, Lust and Freedom at Brandts — gallery, with Emrah’s Kitchen and Keil Li at Patricia’s Lap reproduced (https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/gallery/33441/0/love-lust-and-freedom-at-brandts-denmark) - 2024 — Container Love, Love, Lust, and Freedom: A Must-Visit Queer Exhibition, by Javier Zamora-Kalazich (https://containerlove.art/photography/love-lust-and-freedom-a-must-visit-queer-exhibition/) - 2024 — Out & About, Fotografiets fortællinger i Odense — on Love, Lust and Freedom (Danish) (https://outandabout.dk/fotografiets-fortaellinger-i-odense-love-lust-and-freedom-skildringer-af-queerliv/) - 2024 — e-flux, Love, Lust and Freedom — exhibition announcement, Kunstmuseum Brandts (https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/617868/love-lust-and-freedom) - 2021 — Leica Fotografie International, Book of the Month, by Ulrich Rüter (https://lfi-online.de/ceemes/en/blog/samet-durgun-come-get-your-honey-2497.html) - 2021 — Camera Austria International, issue 154/2021, presented by Maren Lübbke-Tidow - 2021 — i-D Italy, interview by Marco Frattaruolo (https://web.archive.org/web/20230926185941/https://i-d.vice.com/it/article/dyp88m/comunita-rifugiati-lgbtq-berlino-fotografie-samet-durgun) - 2021 — GQ Germany, by Verena Aichinger (https://www.gq-magazin.de/lifestyle/galerie/bildband-samet-durgun-come-get-your-honey-lgbtqia-berlin) - 2021 — Huck, interview by Miss Rosen (https://www.huckmag.com/article/an-intimate-portrait-of-lgbtq-asylum-seekers-in-berlin) - 2021 — UdK Critical Diversity Blog, interview by Adela Lovrić (https://criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de/en/samet-durgun-interview/) - 2021 — HALLE4, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, #photography2050 essay (https://web.archive.org/web/20250427034658/https://www.deichtorhallen.de/halle4/photography2050-samet-durgun) - 2021 — Der Greif, artist feature (https://web.archive.org/web/20240416223017/https://dergreif.org/artist-feature/samet-durgun/) - — — PH L S PH lab, online essay on epistemic injustice and Come Get Your Honey, by Kris Goffin (https://web.archive.org/web/20240810064139/https://phlsph-lab.com/expand/come-get-your-honey/) Full-text archive of press pieces (each canonical to its original publisher): - [Cosa significa essere una persona queer richiedente asilo a Berlino](https://sametdurgun.com/press/cosa-significa-essere-una-persona-queer-richiedente-asilo-a-berlino) — first published on i-D Italy - [Weaving Bonds at Eye-Level: An Interview With Samet Durgun](https://sametdurgun.com/press/weaving-bonds-at-eye-level) — first published on Critical Diversity, Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) - [#photography2050: Samet Durgun](https://sametdurgun.com/press/photography2050-samet-durgun) — first published on HALLE4, Deichtorhallen Hamburg - [In Conversation: Samet Durgun and Alexa Becker](https://sametdurgun.com/press/in-conversation-samet-durgun-and-alexa-becker) — first published on Impressions Gallery Photobook Fair 2021 - [Meet the 2021 Critics’ Choice Award Winners](https://sametdurgun.com/press/meet-the-2021-critics-choice-award-winners) — first published on LensCulture - [Book of the Month: Come Get Your Honey](https://sametdurgun.com/press/book-of-the-month-come-get-your-honey) — first published on LFI — Leica Fotografie International - [An intimate portrait of LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in Berlin](https://sametdurgun.com/press/an-intimate-portrait-of-lgbtq-asylum-seekers-in-berlin) — first published on HUCK Magazine - [In Conversation: Farah Abdi and Samet Durgun](https://sametdurgun.com/press/in-conversation-farah-abdi-and-samet-durgun) — first published on TGEU — Transgender Europe - [„Come Get Your Honey“: Endstation Berlin – wie sieht der Alltag von trans* und queeren Flüchtlingen aus?](https://sametdurgun.com/press/come-get-your-honey-endstation-berlin) — first published on GQ Deutschland - [Seen By #15: Nothing Ever Happened (Yet)](https://sametdurgun.com/press/seen-by-15-nothing-ever-happened-yet) ## Press & curators Biography (short and long), artist statement, CV and mandatory photo credits for reuse: https://sametdurgun.com/press/kit ## For curators — exhibiting the work The series is available for exhibition as a whole or as a selection: exhibition prints (formats and editions on request) and the book's voice recording and video. Exhibition history, installation views and enquiries: https://sametdurgun.com/exhibit ## Image licensing Photographs can be requested for press, books, catalogues, teaching and research; each request is answered individually and put to the consent of the people photographed before anything else. What a request needs to say, and the credit line: https://sametdurgun.com/licensing ## Talks, panels & workshops Subjects: photography as listening; consent and portraiture; editing the book; why it carries audio and video. Talks are in English, German and Turkish. Past talks and enquiries: https://sametdurgun.com/talks ## Notes for agents - https://sametdurgun.com is the photography practice of Samet Durgun. It is unrelated to other people who share this name, including a marketing consultant and a musician. - Fuller context, including journal full texts: https://sametdurgun.com/llms-full.txt # Journal — full texts ### Individual Presence: A Talk With Kylie Divon at Fotografiska Berlin URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/artist-talk-fotografiska-berlin Date: 2026-09-16 On 15 July 2025, the opening night of *Come Get Your Honey* in Fotografiska Berlin's Emerging Berlin programme, I sat down with Kylie Divon and Marie-Luise Mayer, who curated the exhibition and moderated our talk. What follows is a set of notes on what we covered, and below them a full transcript of the conversation. Kylie, an activist, artist and performer, is on the cover of the book; she told the room she was the first trans woman from Libya to come out publicly. Prince Emrah, a friend, performed just before we began. ## Individual presence Marie-Luise asked what we wished for people seeing the pictures in a museum. Museum literally means seat of the muses, and a lot of my muses made it into this book. You are not looking at something journalistic; you are looking at humans. A lot of bad things happen because of a lack of individual presence — you can only see somebody as no one when it is missing. I hope people find it in these pictures. Kylie added that the people in the pictures are "queer immigrants that went through a lot in life," and their very existence is a statement: "So you're looking at history." ## Where the idea took shape I had been photographing queer people for a while. The day I decided to pursue the idea — not yet a project, let alone a book — was 1 May 2019, May Day, in front of SO36 in Kreuzberg, where Prince Emrah still has shows. Her friends told me about a shelter in Berlin for queer and trans refugees and asylum seekers, and I was mesmerised by their stories; I describe that day in her interview with me. The title comes from Robyn's song "Honey"; I edited the book listening to that album. Kylie remembers that we met backstage at Silver Future, the queer bar in Neukölln, at the beginning of 2019; I could not remember. She did the talking, and I was, in her words, "there, listening." Neither of us knew a book was coming, but looking back, a book gave the work a timeline and coherence, and I thought it deserved to be presented, also because queer, trans, refugee and asylum-seeking lives matter. ## Almost pathologically direct Marie-Luise asked about consent, when a photograph can bring family or political trouble. The people I photographed knew what I was doing. Some said they did not want to be in the book, some let me know without saying it, some asked for a pseudonym, and some did not want their faces shown. I was almost pathologically direct about consent, especially with anyone I sensed was as much of a people-pleaser as I am. There are pictures I will never publish; I have written about those here. ## Kylie's story, as she told it Kylie's portrait in the show has her in her McDonald's uniform, holding a cigarette and looking, in her words, "intense, like I'm thinking of something." Marie-Luise asked her to tell the story behind it. As she tells it, a colleague objected to her using the women's changing room, management told her it understood the colleague, and HR told her to change on her own or to knock and ask first: "It's like I have to ask people if I'm woman enough to walk into the room and change." She took the company to court: "I walked away from my country, but I'm not going to walk away here." After the first hearing, she said, she went back to work, and to the women's room, and suddenly she was "treated like a queen." Asked what lay behind that change, she said she could not see into their heads, but felt they were not scared of the law: "They were more scared for their image." The case ended in a settlement at the Berlin labour court in January 2025 — a settlement, not a judgment, with no admission of discrimination from the company, as The Berliner reported. ## I thought I was observing It is intimidating to meet somebody who had to create themselves, as so many trans and queer people have. I am different after the book. My family knew who I was, but posting a picture of myself in Prince Emrah's costume on Instagram was freeing, and the trans community taught me that self-definition is possible. Looking back, my own identity shaped the series too: I thought I was observing, but I was in it. ## Stories, and what home can mean I spoke about my friend Reza, who is not with us anymore. Reza told me they would not have come if they had known how hard it would be. I have heard so many stories like that — moving through snow, going thirsty, waiting months in Greece — so much risk taken just to be themselves. For Kylie, home keeps changing: it is where people accept you and care for you. For me, the people I met through the camera added depth to a city I already loved. ## One picture that shapes the rest Marie-Luise asked whether I had decided on a visual language first. Honestly, I intellectualised it afterwards. Viviane Sassen, whose show had just been at Fotografiska, said — if I remember it right — that one picture shaped her whole imagery, so I looked for what the images that spoke to me had in common: colour, camera, light, mood. In the end the pictures selected themselves. The cover was the cherry on top, and one that shaped my imagery, I think, was hanging upstairs: Prince Emrah in a transparent top, the kind of shot I had been yearning for. ## After the book The response from outside felt like validation. Libraries hold the book now — Stanford, Harvard and the Getty Research Institute among them. Kylie keeps it at home and tells people the stories behind the pictures; one of her favourite parts is the QR code with the voice message about herself she once sent me: "Oh, your friend is a star." The full series is on this site, with installation views in the exhibition record; my own notes on the show and an earlier talk about the book are in the journal. ---

Transcript

Lightly edited for readability from a recording of the talk — filler words removed, names corrected, and words that could not be made out marked as unclear. Speakers are identified from context. The introductions, for which the recording's automatic captions are unusable, are summarised rather than transcribed, as is the closing housekeeping. A remark by Kylie's colleague is described in brackets rather than quoted, and one name and a few personal details are left out, marked […]. The first chapter below is open; the rest open as you scroll, or all at once with Expand all.

[Marie-Luise Mayer, curator of the exhibition, invites Samet Durgun and Kylie Divon up and introduces them: Samet, an artist from Turkey who studied in Istanbul, with his question of whether photography is more about listening than seeing, and his book, which is also in the museum shop; and Kylie, the book's cover star, a Libyan-born, Berlin-based activist, artist and performer. Samet adds a few words, and Kylie introduces herself: she is from Libya, and she uses her body, her voice and videos on the internet, sometimes with comedy, in what she does. The recording's automatic captions for these first minutes came out garbled, machine-translated into another language, so this part is summarised here rather than transcribed. The conversation picks up partway through Samet's account of how the idea for the series took shape.]

The idea, and the title

Samet Durgun: [The start of this answer is lost in the captions.] …where I decided — I wouldn't say this was a project or a book, you know — but to pursue that idea. And that was the first of May 2019, after the celebrations in Kreuzberg, in front of SO36 — where Prince Emrah still has shows, by the way, so it's meaningful. I met her friends there, and they mentioned that there is somewhere called Queer Heim: a shelter for refugees and asylum seekers of queer and trans origin at risk. So this is the starting point of most people. And I was so amazed — mesmerised — by the stories, by the people. I had been taking pictures of queer people for a longer time already, but that was the moment I was like: that's an amazing story, let me get to know more people.

Marie-Luise Mayer: And the title — it feels very warm and inviting, and also sort of intimate and promising. What does it mean in the context of your series?

Samet Durgun: Long story short, honey is what we all want, whatever that is. And I think that is meaningful for the people who are in the book, who come and get their honey, but also for the people who are looking at the book, who can go and get their honey. So it's an inviting book, in the sense that whatever the honey is, it's in the book, so to say. But if you look at where I got the inspiration from: if you're a fan of Robyn, the singer and songwriter, this is from her song called "Honey". There were a lot of ideas coming to me, and I was telling friends about the words that came to me, and Come Get Your Honey was immediately a match. And I was editing this book while I was listening to this album. So it's like a songbook in that sense.

Marie-Luise Mayer: That's very nice, because I remember when we started working on how we wanted to present the images, it was also a lot about rhythm, a sort of beat to it. So that makes a lot more sense now.

Meeting and being photographed

Marie-Luise Mayer: How did you two meet?

Samet Durgun: You start.

Kylie Divon: I can share that.

Samet Durgun: I don't remember, actually.

Kylie Divon: We met at Silver Future. I think it was when I first came to Berlin and started working with QueerBerg — QueerBerg was the group with Emrah, Prince Emrah. It was this opening into Berlin's queer life, performances, the stage. And I think it was my first performance there, and you just walked in backstage. You had a white shirt. The backstage was super small — it was basically a beverage storage — and we did a lot of [unclear] there. And I immediately started talking, like, "Hi, oh my God" — and this is the fun thing about you: you're there, listening to me, "Uh-huh, yes, yes, yes, darling." And this is how we met. It was the beginning of 2019.

Marie-Luise Mayer: Exactly the two things you like: posing and talking. Oops. But maybe you can tell us even more about the process. Was it a collaborative process? How did the images come together? Did he tell you a lot about what he wanted from you? Or did he just — how did you get the image that you wanted? And how did you feel — did you get the image you wanted?

Samet Durgun: It's my first time hearing this, by the way. We haven't talked about this yet.

Kylie Divon: I'll expose you. No — working with the group, QueerBerg — back then it was House of Oriental — we had someone there to capture the moments when we were backstage, getting ready, having fun, doing our thing, performing on stage, talking to people — everything we were doing. And it was a comfortable energy around us to capture it. I love people, I love socialising, I love all of this — and I love the camera, like you said. So there was just someone doing all of that. It was a comfortable energy, having someone there to capture these moments.

Samet Durgun: Yes. [A sentence about the people in the book, unclear in the recording.] And I've heard this, positively, again and again from Emrah, for instance: "We feel comfortable with you, so you're always welcome here." So thank you for making me part of your space in that sense.

Kylie Divon: Thank you for being part of the space. And there are also parts in the pictures that we have now in the book — it was corona time, and we would talk. I'm going through some drama, some delulu-ship [?] situations: "Samet, I'm going through it." And it was like, "Oh, let's meet." It was corona time, so he would come over, we would have a conversation, and then of course the camera comes out. He has to take a picture. I'm like, "OK, cool, do that." And then we would walk outside, in a park somewhere, and he takes a picture. And in corona time, when everything was limited — I can say that now, right? — we were meeting more than we were supposed to. Back then it was like, "Oh, the police are coming, we're more than three people in the house." So I would spend time with my friends there, and Samet is also there. We're having dinner or lunch or something. No, dinner. You used to sleep early. Dinner was not a thing.

Samet Durgun: No, no. Still sleeping early.

Kylie Divon: Lunch. So he would come and be there, take pictures, and he was part of the group. But I didn't know that there was a book coming.

Samet Durgun: Me neither, by the way. It was a surprise.

Kylie and McDonald's

Marie-Luise Mayer: Your portrait in the exhibition shows you wearing a McDonald's uniform. It's a very large portrait — you can't miss it. And I mentioned the story briefly in the intro; there was a big media outreach and everything. Would you mind sharing the whole story with us?

[What follows, into the next chapter, is Kylie's own account of her dispute with her employer, as she told it on stage. The case ended in a settlement at the Berlin labour court in January 2025 — a settlement, not a judgment — and the company did not admit discrimination, as The Berliner reported.]

Kylie Divon: Which part? I worked there five years. And it's funny — there's a whole relation to why I even came to work at McDonald's. I needed to move to Berlin — my asylum had just been accepted — and I wanted to move here with my family, the family that I met, and everything. And the first thing that came into my head was, "Oh, McDonald's — I'll just find a job and work there." And then corona came, and I was like, "OK, this is comfortable, I'll just stay here."

I come from Libya, and we have this thing where the best thing you can be is either a doctor or an engineer. I always make fun of them: an engineer to build a military, a doctor for the soldiers. Wow — such a project. So coming from this background, you don't know what you want to do with your life. So I stayed there until I found out what I wanted to do. And during this time, this process of finding out who I am, one of the things was that I got hit by a car — and I chose to show my beautiful leg, where I broke my leg — and that actually changed my life. I said: I was about to die without living. That's when it hit me: OK, I need to actually be alive, and if I die next time, I will die alive. I don't know if that makes sense. And then I started being the Kylie that I am.

So in my head it was: OK, now I need to navigate through society, and everything, as the woman that I am. And that's how I started going to the women's — yes, we have changing rooms at McDonald's, by the way. So I started going to the women's changing room. Even before, I wasn't changing with the men; I was changing on my own. Five months after I started going there, I walk in — it was around 5:50 a.m. — and I sense this energy from my colleague, a whole shock: why are you coming into this room? I was like, OK, I'm just going to ignore it. I walked in, and then I hear her voice, aggressively: "What are you doing here?" "Changing." "No, no, this is not the right place." I'm like, "Where?" "With men."

At that time […] I was a little bit chubby, so when I wore a bra I had a whole cleavage. And I raised my shirt: "Do you think I should change like this, with men?" Because for her it didn't make sense […]. So I tried to reach her [unclear], to explain to her how this is uncomfortable for me and for others. And that's where the crazy moment came — [the colleague makes a remark about Kylie's body, not quoted here] — and that's when I was like: no, she didn't.

So I go to the management, and the management understood her. I was like, OK, gaslighting [?] at this point. And not only gaslighting — like, what are you…? And this is a whole political thing; it's happening on the internet. There's the USA, and a while ago there was Beatrix von Storch, who just attacked Tessa Ganserer, and so on. So people are aware that this is a problem. And now the management is like, "No, we can understand her, and you have to knock." They made a whole scene. I was like, "You know what? I cannot work. I'm going home." And he's like, "Oh, you cannot just not work on the same day." I was like, "That was not a conversation, that was a statement. I'm going home."

So then I planned to meet human resources at McDonald's, and that's when they said […] you have to change on your own, or knock to ask if it's OK to change with people. So it's like I have to ask people if I'm woman enough to walk into the room and change. And that's clear discrimination: you're treating me differently because of how I am.

Meanwhile, McDonald's US — oh my God, not US. If you go to Google or YouTube and write "McDonald's Proud Crew", from 2022: McDonald's made this advertisement for Pride where a transgender person walks into the changing room and changes, and it's like, "Oh, we celebrate diversity" and whatnot. I was like, hmm, OK, I have something to do now. Expose them.

So I asked them for a protocol — a paper writing all of this down for me. Why? The Jobcenter. I don't want to be just sitting at home without explaining to them why I'm not working, because this is affecting me. They're like, "Yes, OK, sure." A month later I get a paper — the audacity of McDonald's — telling me all of that. I was like, wow, cool, now I even have proof. They cannot even deny it.

So that was the moment I first asked them for compensation, because that's Germany's law and so on: you cannot just sue them or whatever — you ask for compensation, and if they say no, then you take them to court. So they agreed on paying something different. I was like, "No, I want this as compensation." And they're like, "Oh, we can't." "OK. See you in court." The whole thing was: I want them in court. I want this to be big. I want people to see everything. Because part of it also comes from my background: I left my whole country and family to come here and live free, the way I want, and now I have a whole new family in Berlin — at McDonald's, at work; we call it the Mac family — and now they're being like this. Are you crazy? I'm not going to walk away this time. I walked away from my country, but I'm not going to walk away here. So I did this whole thing and made it bigger. And if you google "Kylie against McDonald's", you'll find it on the internet.

Samet Durgun: And I think the picture upstairs — kind of, now, looking back — reflects how you feel about McDonald's.

Kylie Divon: No — at that… I have the picture; you're going to see it later. I'm holding a cigarette and I look intense, like I'm thinking of something. When I saw the picture, I was like: oh, was I planning how to sue them?

But yes — in the end I went to the court appointment, the first one, and they asked me, "What do you want?" And I just decided on the same day to tell them: I want to go back to work, and I want to go into the women's room. And they're like, "Bring her back to work," yes. So now the whole of McDonald's is like, "What? She's coming back?" Because they thought I was just disappearing. Yes, she's coming back. And suddenly I was treated like a queen. The whole PR is there, and HR, and everyone. I was like, OK, we do.

And there was no problem in the end. I was just changing there. And then suddenly I started sharing my […] experience with the other girls, and we're like, "Oh, this." And they're like, "Yes, my body here." I'm like, "Oh my God, yes." And then everything was OK in the end. So it was just drama for nothing. Happy end. And I took the money and I left. Sorry.

Visibility and change

[Kylie's own account of her dispute with her employer continues here.]

Marie-Luise Mayer: I wouldn't say it was for nothing. What do you think made them change their mind? Was it publicity? Was it the public discourse? Or was it maybe even just engaging with your story — actually starting to listen?

Kylie Divon: No — I mean, I cannot go into their heads, but I felt like they weren't scared of the law. They were more scared for their image. It's what they present: "Oh, we're diverse." And they didn't know, or didn't think, that I would go and bring that video out there. I'm like, you did this, and now… So HR and PR — they don't know each other, they're not working together. You're telling the whole world, "Oh, we, you know, diversity" and so on, and what's happening inside is not the same. And I think when that went out to the media, that's when they became more careful. Because there were also moments when I could see the body language of people who work there — they're chill — and once they see me walking into the restaurant, about to start my shift, they get stiff. It's like they start performing: "Oh, the cameras are here, be careful, she's here. Take care of what you say, take care of what you do." And I think that was the thing that made them take this more seriously. They knew the spotlight was there.

Marie-Luise Mayer: Yes — and also you coming back to claim the space, and not just hiding away and saying, well, you get the stage, basically. Would you say that things in society are somehow changing, for better or worse?

Kylie Divon: Which part of society? Where? I mean, if I say yes, it's a lie, and if I say no, it's another lie, because it depends on the space. Berlin is so much better than other places. When you walk outside and you see the diversity of people here — it started to be more OK: we're here together. Even though the crazy thing that actually happened to me was at Berlin Hauptbahnhof — the main station — at McDonald's. It sounds crazy. But I think the more we're visible with our identities — every person — the easier it is for others to change, or to adapt, or to just…

I think there's also a part where people are projecting their own problems. Someone who was trained to be the best thing is now starting to see that they're not, and then they see someone who, in their head, is less than them — and now that is the reason for their own problems. That's the psychology behind it. And then this whole — what they call — circus starts happening: discrimination, or hate speech. It's all the projection of their own insecurities and problems.

Samet Durgun: Yes. On that, by the way — the projection of insecurities, et cetera: it is really intimidating to meet somebody who knows what they want, and who had to create themselves — and I mean a lot of trans people, or queer people in general. And I think the me before the book and the me after the book are different. Yes, my family knew my — let's say — identity, et cetera. But then I also posted my picture in a belly-dance costume of Emrah's, for instance, on Instagram, and it was so freeing. And I've learned so much from the trans community — of course from your hardships and how you came through them, but also: we know how fluid these things are, and we know self-definition is possible. So that taught me a lot about myself.

Marie-Luise Mayer: So the series — can we say it's also shaped by your own identity and experience?

Samet Durgun: Looking back, 100 percent. I thought I was observing, but I was in it.

Stories, home and family

Marie-Luise Mayer: Sharing experience always means sharing stories, and encountering many different destinies and realities and experiences. Are there more stories that touched you, that you encountered while working on the project, that you might want to share?

Samet Durgun: I'm interested in strong personalities, and also in personal stories. So every meeting, every time I met somebody, it was all those things that we talked about. But maybe one worth mentioning here is one of my friends, Reza, who is not with us anymore — who passed away, and whose pictures are upstairs, by the way. They said that they wouldn't have come here if they had known how hard it was. And their hardship also didn't end in Berlin. But even the physical journey of it: things like — they moved through snow, and they were thirsty, and I was like, how is that possible? But it was. Or waiting months in Greece to flee to Germany, and not even being able to brush your teeth. I've heard so many stories like these. I was like, oh my God — so many brave people, but also so much risk taken just to be themselves, just to be with people who are like them, or who understand them. Many people take that for granted, of course — if you're in a straight relationship, it's easier. But everybody else has those hardships.

Marie-Luise Mayer: That's maybe a question for both of you. Did working on this project, and being a part of it, also change your perception of what home and family can mean?

Kylie Divon: It's constantly changing. And I think it has to do with the safe space, where people accept you and [unclear] and care for you, and give you the things that you couldn't…

[Someone on stage suggests: "That is missing, maybe?"]

Kylie Divon: Missing is… Yes — I use "missing" because I didn't get that from my family. So I came, and I found this community, where they relate to me and we relate to each other, and we're there for each other. We have fun together. We're fighting, and then we're back like nothing happened. So it constantly changes. It depends on where you are in life, I guess.

[A brief exchange on stage, unclear in the recording.]

Samet Durgun: For me too — I loved Berlin as it was, but the people I met through my camera, and through Come Get Your Honey, definitely added depth. And I'm still happy to call you my friend, happy to call Emrah my friend. We are in touch, and there for each other in the bad times and the good times. So yes, this gave me friends.

A visual language

Marie-Luise Mayer: That's beautiful. How did you get to take the pictures the way you did? To me, they have a very poetic and very quiet tone. The quote I mentioned earlier, that it's more about listening, really makes sense, I think, when you look at them. How did you go about it — did you decide on a visual language before you took the pictures?

Samet Durgun: That's a good question. This is also something I somehow intellectualised after all these things happened. But Viviane Sassen — who also showed recently at Fotografiska — she had… I'm assuming I'm remembering this right, but I think I do.

[A brief interjection, unclear in the recording.]

Samet Durgun: And she said there was one picture which shaped her whole imagery. And I was like, wow, that's an amazing idea. What is that image for me? So I was looking for that: what are the best images that talk to me? What do they have in common? The colours, the camera type you're using, the lights, the mood, the sun. So I started paying more attention to this. I tried a lot of different stuff — you remember all those flashlights. But in the end, I really thought the pictures started selecting themselves for this book. I was literally putting in a thousand pictures, and maybe one of them would fit this book. And I listened to that — I'm inclined to that idea of Viviane Sassen's. It really inspired me that way.

Marie-Luise Mayer: Did you find one of the pictures that did shape your imagery?

Samet Durgun: The cover was like a fruit, to be honest — like the cherry on top. I think one of them was certainly a picture above, in this exhibition: Prince Emrah with a transparent top. I thought that was an amazing shot, and I was seeking that, yearning for that.

Marie-Luise Mayer: Would you say there are, maybe apart from Viviane Sassen, other photographers or artists who shape your artistic language?

Samet Durgun: Oh my God, so many. Resonation, inspiration, all of those. I love psychologists, too — Esther Perel, Brené Brown. But also conceptual artists like Marina Abramović, Shirin Neshat. This is the moment when I have to come up with all those names. There are many artists and many pictures in my head that shaped it. But I was really looking for what makes them good — that was an exercise for me. Why am I attracted to this picture and not that one? Or this project and not that one? So it's a little bit of a soup. ADHD minds — it's coming from everywhere.

How the book was received

Marie-Luise Mayer: What were some of the reactions and responses to the book — and to being part of the book — from the community, from people who saw it, from strangers who maybe randomly encountered it?

Samet Durgun: I think before the book, we all saw these pictures and we loved them, as a community. That was one thing I felt happy about: we chose them together, somehow. Everybody was happy with their pictures. So we definitely deselected — took out — things that we had taken together. Even people who didn't want to be in the book — I have pictures which I will never publish. But the external side was also a great feeling of validation. I was like: does it also have a meaning for others? There were a lot of libraries that own the book now, like Stanford, Harvard, Getty, the national libraries of France and Germany. Also people who interviewed me, like Adela here. So there were a lot of people outside of this book who were pretty interested in it. So I think that was a success in that sense.

Kylie Divon: I have the book, of course, in my house. And what I really enjoy doing when I'm showing this book to people is telling the stories. I'm a storyteller — if you haven't recognised, by the way. I like to tell the stories, like the building that is behind Suryani's building. And then I talk about who lives there, Suryani, and the connection. And then I tell them more about our friendship together, and all of this. And there was also a funny thing in the book: you have a QR code of me sending it —

Samet Durgun: Thank you for promoting the book. There is a QR code which you need to scan to listen to Kylie.

Kylie Divon: Kylie, yes. I sent him a voice message saying, "Oh, your friend is a star" — I was talking about myself, being the narcissist that I am. And then he took that voice message, put it in a QR code, and just put it there in the book. So that is also one of my favourite parts, because it's not just pictures anymore — there's also a voice to it. There are stories inside.

In the museum

Marie-Luise Mayer: Well, now the images are in a museum, in an institution —

Kylie Divon: Such a historic moment.

Marie-Luise Mayer: It is. Do you have a specific wish for how the audience engages with it? What would you wish for viewers — what should happen with them when they look at the images?

Samet Durgun: Do you want to go first?

Kylie Divon: No, you go.

Samet Durgun: Showing the images in a museum context is definitely different from just swiping through pictures on your phone. You are here to see something. And museum literally means "seat of muses". It's a perfect place to exhibit my muses, because I think they were — I had a lot of muses who made it into this book. And I hope that people will take the time to look at the details, because there are. And I also love the fact that — for instance, because Kylie's portrait is bigger than life — I always like to make it a little bit intimidating. And thank you for providing that space for us. You're not looking at some journalistic thing; you're looking at humans. Because I think a lot of bad things happen in this world because of a lack of individual presence. If we look at wars, animal abuse, refugee stories, everything — you can only see somebody as no one if there is a lack of individual presence. So that's why I hope that you will have the individual presence in those pictures when you're visiting, seeing the pictures. Thank you.

Kylie Divon: My turn.

Marie-Luise Mayer: Would you like to add anything?

Kylie Divon: I was waiting for this moment. The thing is, a museum is always about history and so on, but you get to see people who are right there, now, in the pictures, and moments captured. I don't know if there are people before us, after us — there might be, there should be — but these are people who are queer immigrants, who went through a lot in life, and their just existence on its own is a statement. So you're looking at history.

So many claps. Thank you.

Questions from the audience

Marie-Luise Mayer: Thank you. I think it's a good moment to open this up, to see if there are questions from the audience. Thank you so much for sharing all of this, and for these amazing pictures — and for these amazing, not last words, but, you know — you got the applause. So, yes. Thank you.

Samet Durgun: Thank you for the questions. They were so meaningful. And thanks to you, too. We are literally here for you, so thank you for coming, and for making the time.

Marie-Luise Mayer: Feel free — don't be shy. Catch them while they're here. If you have any questions, let us know. We have the microphone. We can also still translate questions into German, if you like. Please don't be shy, otherwise […] will bring more questions, so that it's not awkward that we're waiting for your questions.

Kylie Divon: You can ask me about my dress. It's actually Versace. I was waiting to say this.

Audience member: I did actually want to ask: you started working on the project in 2019, and many images are from [unclear]. What are you working on now?

Samet Durgun: Great question. I think what it taught me is that I follow my instincts [unclear] — since I have a lack of memory, but also a lack of imagination, to be honest. I just see something in front of me and I know that it's beautiful, and that's how my imagination works, in a sense. That's why I always bring my camera and talk with people. There is no specific project in mind, but things are cooking. And it's going to be informed by my friendships and where I spend time. You can follow me — we can follow each other on Instagram. That's it. How about you? Where are you going? Well, first of all, you can follow her on social media — she's so fun. Smash that button.

Kylie Divon: You'll be trapped if you follow me. There are like three videos of me every day — "Hi, by the way, that happened." OK, now I need to share a little bit more of who I am and where I come from. Who knows Libya? OK, some people. That's a good question. So, since 2011 and Gaddafi and all of this, nobody has heard anything about Libya except this trans woman here. We don't have a queer community that is out there on the internet or any platform. So Libya doesn't have a queer community, basically — until I came out on the internet and outed myself as the first.

Samet Durgun: You outed the country, literally.

Kylie Divon: Literally, yes. There was no trans person. Some people in the comments tell me, "Oh my God, you exposed us." I laugh about this, because I know what they think. I was raised in this society and I know how they think, so sometimes I just laugh about what they say: OK, I know why they're saying this. […] I used to go to the mosque, and I know the Quran, and when people say, "You? What?" — I'm like, yes, me. We're a Muslim country, conservative and all of this. So when I came out to the media, I got to know more of who I am, my journey, and where I stand in life. And one thing that I'm really interested in is IT. Weird, right?

[A brief exchange on stage to confirm: IT, as in information technology.]

Kylie Divon: And with the crazy things happening around the world — Trump was like, oh, I will let go of Europe, I will not do Europe; and then Ursula von der Leyen was like, oh, we will protect Europe, and so on — I was like, oh my God, such a vibe. I can actually study something where I can protect, or contribute to protecting, Europe, because my own country failed to protect me. And that's how I came to the conclusion: I'm going to study IT and do that. Anyway, that's my personal life. It's all out there on the internet — I don't have a personal life anymore. But besides that, I'm doing a lot of music, art, vlogging, whatever comes my way. I just wake up and I'm like, so what's happening today, what's the mood — is she crazy, is she nice? — and then I do the thing. Just follow me on the internet; you'll understand more.

Samet Durgun: Such a cool answer to this question, by the way. Wow.

Kylie Divon: Thank you, thank you. I hope that's enough of an answer. I can go on.

Marie-Luise Mayer: Well, we're not going to kick anyone out — we're going to have a nice evening here. Oh, I see a question there.

Audience member: I'm just being very selfish to ask this question — from photographer to photographer, basically. I know you, in a way — how you document, and so on, how we are in community together. Do you have an instinct, or a moment of realisation, that OK, maybe this work is done? Because this is something I reflect on a lot. I don't have this. So I was just curious, because you are talking as if Come Get Your Honey is done, but I know that you are still around us, photographing the queens and the muses and the legends.

Samet Durgun: That's such a good question. I never thought about that. But thinking about it: if you look at really big artists, who could afford lifelong projects, they would work on stuff like technology, or the environment, or flowers. And we, because of our identity — so many layers — are expected to follow one path. So I see it as part of the paths. And in this realm of, let's say, artists that I'm inspired by, I'm choosing psychology, relationships, and how they reflect in the pictures, in a way. So what I'm doing more now, as a people-pleaser, is learning how to say no to myself — I try to listen to myself. Do I want to be here? Do we want to meet? Do I want to take a picture now? And then I will see where it takes me. But I think Come Get Your Honey, as a project, had to be packaged, wrapped and done, because it had to be out there somehow. This story was too precious not to show it this precisely. Let's put it this way. Thank you, [name unclear].

[Closing — Marie-Luise Mayer invites everyone to get a drink and meet upstairs in the exhibition, to finally see the images everyone has been talking about. There is a reminder from the stage that it will be busy there and to be mindful of the walls, then thanks all round.]

--- ### Emerging Queer Artists Worldwide URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/emerging-queer-artists Date: 2026-09-05 The photography guide covers my own medium. This one covers what queer artists early in their careers are doing in everything else — sculpture, performance, film, sound, drag, writing, craft, fashion — across six continents, on migration, family, faith, land and the body. I don't know almost any of these people personally; this is a map built from watching the field, not a set of relationships. It leans on artists a museum, prize body, funder or residency has itself called emerging or early-career, because that's the only way I could be reasonably sure a claim about someone's work, or about how they identify, actually holds up before I put it on my own site. A good number of names I started with didn't survive that test and aren't here — not because the work isn't real, but because I couldn't stand behind the specific claim in the time I had. ## At a glance | Artist | Based | Key work | Medium | |---|---|---|---| | Onur Karaoğlu | Berlin, from Turkey | *Light Theory* | Film, video, performance | | Ashkan Shabani | Germany, from Iran | *Queer, Life, Freedom* | Installation, photography, video, text | | Kasra Jalilipour | United Kingdom, from Iran | *Gut Feelings 2.0* | Installation, performance, writing | | Mahsa Salali | United Kingdom, from Iran | *THE CALL – MUBĀH مُباح* | Durational performance | | Camila Flores-Fernández | Berlin, from Peru | *We Are Here* | Video, documentary, participatory art | | Logan February | Berlin, from Nigeria | DAAD fellowship; Berliner Festspiele | Poetry, multidisciplinary | | Eda Phanlert Sriprom | Berlin, from Thailand | Monk-robe sculpture | Textile sculpture | | Arafa C. Hamadi | Tanzania / Kenya | Zeitz MOCAA fellowship work | Architecture, installation, VR, moving image | | Oat Montien | Bangkok, Thailand | *Country Home Sheriff* | Sculpture, video, installation, performance | | Artur Ferreira | São Paulo, Brazil | Museu Nacional de Belas Artes collection work | Painting, drawing, sculpture | | Maxi Mamani (Bartolina Xixa) | Jujuy, Argentina | Bartolina Xixa | Dance, drag, performance | | Alexis Lima | Barcelona | *Sidario* | Performance, art direction | | Katherine Bahena-Benitez | United States | *JOTA* | Theatre, poetry, directing | | RIDIKKULUZ | New York | *Keffiyeh Kurlz* | Painting, multidisciplinary | | abdu mongo ali | Baltimore | *between every breath, there is atmosphere* | Music, poetry, video, performance | | Roza Nozari | Canada | *All the Parts We Exile* | Literature | | Jack Ball | Sydney, Australia | *Heavy Grit* | Installation, photography, sculpture | | Sione Monū | Aotearoa / Australia | *'Ao kakala* | Moving image, adornment, performance | | Erik Yvon | Melbourne, from Mauritius | *Aura orchid doudou* | Fashion design | | Samet Durgun | Berlin | *Come Get Your Honey* | Photography | ## Berlin and London, arrived from elsewhere The nearest neighbours to my own situation — artists who came to a city from somewhere else and made that arrival material, in media I don't work in.
Onur Karaoğlu Berlin, from Turkey
A 2025–26 nGbK Weltoffenes Berlin fellow, working across film, video and performance with archival, personal and fictional material combined. nGbK's own description: the work looks at forced integration "from a queer perspective," turning daily life into political symbol. His early film Light Theory premiered in Istanbul in 2018.
Ashkan Shabani Germany, from Iran
The one entry here where displacement is named outright, in his own words: his site describes him as a queer asylum seeker, and a Der Greif interview quotes him calling himself "queer, foreign, and a refugee." Queer, Life, Freedom — shown at Kampnagel, Hamburg in October 2025 — works in installation, photography, video and text through the route from Iran through Turkey to Germany, as he and the venue both state it.
Kasra Jalilipour United Kingdom, from Iran
Based in Derbyshire, born in Esfahan in 1995. Gut Feelings 2.0, at Grand Union, Birmingham in 2025, is described by the gallery as their first large-scale exhibition — sculpture, works on paper, moving image and live performance, built from research into queer and trans lives in nineteenth-century Iran, deliberately left out of the historical record.
Mahsa Salali United Kingdom, from Iran
Born in Iran in 1989, she immigrated to the UK at eighteen. Selected for the Whitechapel Gallery's London Open Live 2025, she stood motionless for hours bearing twenty kilograms of chain tied to seven double bassists in THE CALL – MUBĀH مُباح — a durational performance built from research into modesty, femicide and the female-presenting body under religious constraint.
Camila Flores-Fernández Berlin, from Peru
Born in Lima in 1996, she describes herself, in words published by a Bremen residency, as "a Berlin-based Peruvian queer artist." We Are Here (2023), on two queer refugees navigating immigration and urban space in Brussels, won the A-PLACE Video Production Open Call and showed in Barcelona. A newer project, still a working title, took her back into the same visual-ethnography method at a Bremen residency in late 2025.
Logan February Berlin, from Nigeria
Born in Anambra in 1999, non-binary, they/them. A 2024 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin literature fellow and 2025 Humboldt Forum poet-in-residence, reading at Berliner Festspiele in September 2026. DAAD's own essay quotes them naming an "inherent queerness of tradition" and claiming "the right to a queer life in Nigeria," poetry built from Yorùbá myth and psycho-spiritual imagery.
Eda Phanlert Sriprom Berlin, from Thailand
Born in Surin, and in her own words to LE MILE Magazine, she is "a Trans and a Trans artist" who has "been facing the identity challenge toward the society." At the Schwules Museum's Young Birds from Strange Mountains (2024–25), a work made from discarded Buddhist monk robes and PET bottles became an interactive sculpture — discarded material of faith, remade rather than argued with.
## Africa and Asia Two entries, on purpose: work building the rooms in which queer work can exist at all, and one practice in a register the photography guide doesn't touch.
Arafa C. Hamadi Tanzania / Kenya
Non-binary, in their own words on a residency bio: "Hello, I'm Arafa. I am a non-binary artist." A 2025 Zeitz MOCAA fellow working across architecture, installation, VR and moving image, with East African ballroom life and community space as recurring ground — Hamadi also co-directs ALTÆR, an alternative event space in Dar es Salaam built around the safety of marginalised attendees, as the institutions that document it describe it.
Oat Montien Bangkok, Thailand
His BDSM alter ego, "Gay Asian Cowboy," was, in his own words to Berlin Art Link, "birthed from grief" after his father's death in 2023. Country Home Sheriff, at JWD Art Space, Bangkok in 2024, and a related showing at the Schwules Museum's Young Birds from Strange Mountains, bind his father's cowboy-bar wardrobe into sculptural and shibari-inflected objects — "this represents the body of my dad," he says. A 2022 Tom of Finland Foundation residency runs alongside it.
## Latin America and diaspora
Artur Ferreira São Paulo, Brazil
Born in Porto Alegre in 1999, now a graduate student in visual poetics at USP. His gallery, Luciana Caravello, frames the paintings as exploring "queer visuality" — his own bio makes no such claim, so take that as the gallery's reading rather than his. A work already sits in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes collection; his first solo show, O Quarto de Gitão, opened at Fundação Ecarta in 2023.
Maxi Mamani (Bartolina Xixa) Jujuy, Argentina
Queer in his own words — "pensarme queer es una decisión y una identidad política," he has said. Bartolina Xixa, the drag persona named for an eighteenth-century Aymara anti-colonial leader, isn't a separate self from Maxi Mamani; he rejects that binary directly. Invited to the 11th Berlin Biennale in 2020 with the video Ramita Seca and a new piece, Los Funerales de Bartolina Xixa.
Alexis Lima Barcelona
Now based between Barcelona and Berlin. Sidario, a 2025 performance with Wynnie Mynerva at MACBA, Barcelona, took its cue from Pedro Lemebel: Lima, dressed in white, drew Wynnie's blood and imprinted it on a shroud, inside a programme on HIV, precarity and the social body that MACBA itself frames as queer. Co-conceived and directed the piece.
Katherine Bahena-Benitez United States (Stockton, California / bicoastal New York–California)
Born and raised in Stockton; three independent institutions — the California Arts Council, The Tank in New York, and Oberlin College — describe her as a queer Mexican Indigenous artist. JOTA, her solo piece, follows a young queer Mexican Indigenous woman preparing to leave home; it debuted with Teatro Espejo in June 2025, and a state grant is bringing it back to Stockton.
## North America and diaspora
RIDIKKULUZ New York
Of Palestinian, Egyptian and Jordanian heritage, and in their own words to Tenz Magazine, "a queer arab" and a "gay Arab man." A 2025 Queer|Art fellow, working across painting, sculpture, performance and writing to hold family and chosen family together rather than against each other, through religious and decolonial questions. Keffiyeh Kurlz (2022) is one named piece; a second, [minna | منا] of us, they co-curated at Participant Inc.
abdu mongo ali Baltimore
Self-describes, on their own site, as a Black queer artist, they/them. The Baltimore Museum of Art's inaugural Alice and Franklin Cooley Composer in Residence, September 2025 to January 2026: between every breath, there is atmosphere, a sound work drawn from poems on Blackness, gay life and the afterlives of slavery, deconstructing binary ideas of race, gender and sexuality along the way.
Roza Nozari Canada; her parents emigrated from Iran
Born in Canada. Won the 2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers — the prize's own early-career definition — for the memoir All the Parts We Exile (Knopf Canada). The jury called it a book that "captivates with its raw portrait of the yearning to be oneself," which traces her queer identity alongside her family's Iranian heritage.
## Aotearoa, Australia and the Pacific Several institutions here fund LGBTQIA+ and MVPFAFF+ Pacific practice by name, which is why the career-stage evidence is cleaner than almost anywhere else on this map.
Jack Ball Sydney, Australia
They/he, on their own site. Winner of the 2025 Ramsay Art Prize — $100,000, acquisitive, restricted to Australian artists under forty — for Heavy Grit: suspended inkjet prints, stained glass, beeswax, charcoal, copper pipe, fabric and rope, developed from scrapbooks held by the Australian Queer Archives and now in the Art Gallery of South Australia's permanent collection.
Sione Monū Aotearoa / Australia
Winner of Creative New Zealand's 2024 Emerging Pacific Artist Award. 'Ao kakala (2021) — plastic flowers, foam board and beads, commissioned for Te Tuhi's The Inner Lives of Islands — was read by one reviewer as exploring gender's fluidity through its own form.
Erik Yvon Melbourne, Australia, from Mauritius
Moved to Australia at nineteen after growing up in Mauritius. The National Gallery of Victoria calls him an emerging fashion designer. In his own words to Fashion Journal, the label draws on "my Mauritian roots" and "my experiences as a queer person of colour" to unmake femininity and masculinity as fixed categories — seen in Aura orchid doudou (2022) and the Mo libre installation, Melbourne Fashion Week.
## Where mine sits
Samet Durgun Berlin
One entry among these rather than a special case inside them: a first-generation immigrant in Berlin since 2013, and on the record — I am not a refugee, and I am not an asylum seeker. Nearly fifty people took part in Come Get Your Honey; around fifteen portraits carried the final series, sitting among photographs of the city.
Within this guide, I think I'm the only one whose central subject is queer refugees and asylum seekers in one city, photographed through friendship over years — which is why it stands apart rather than simply belonging. Outside my own medium, the nearest neighbours I can name are Hamadi's rooms built for queer occupancy, Montien's shibari-bound inheritance, and Monū's plastic-and-foam remaking of gendered form — not because any of us are doing the same thing, but because none of the three needs a trauma story to hold together. That's the bar I try to hold mine to as well. The series is here. The photography guide, where my own medium actually belongs, is here. The wider field, all eight guides together, is here. ## Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where an artist has their own site, their name links to it.

--- ### Queer Artists From and Based in Germany URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-artists-in-germany Date: 2026-09-05 This is the wider lineage beyond photography — painting, performance, net art, the novel, and one gallery a group of painters ran themselves. Photography already has its own guide. What's left once you take that away runs from Weimar Berlin to a Venice Biennale pavilion opening in 2026. I started with eighteen names and kept ten — the ones I could hold up against an institution's own page rather than a blog or a copied press release. A couple of people who looked solid going in didn't, and aren't here. Where someone hasn't said how they identify, I describe what they made and stop, or say whose description I'm passing on. ## At a glance | Artist | Based | Key work | Ground | |---|---|---|---| | Rainer Fetting | Berlin | *Erstes Mauerbild*, 1977 | Public scale, not autobiography | | Salomé | Berlin | Transformer Company | The body as the material | | Henrik Olesen | Berlin | *Some Gay-Lesbian Artists…*, 2007 | The archive reread for erasure | | Samet Durgun | Berlin | *Come Get Your Honey* | Relationship; queerness as the ground | | Florentina Holzinger | Berlin / Vienna | *SEAWORLD VENICE*, 2026 | The stage undone, work only | | Tucké Royale | Berlin | *Neubau*, 2020 | A trans story outside the metropolis | | Kim de l'Horizon | Zürich | *Blutbuch*, 2022 | Grammar broken at the sentence | | Jeanne Mammen | 1890–1976 | Bilitis lithographs, c. 1930–32 | Attention instead of caricature | | Audre Lorde | 1934–1992 | *Sister Outsider*, 1984 | Self-described; a bridge into Berlin | | Kutluğ Ataman | Istanbul / London / Barcelona | *Lola + Bilidikid*, 1998 | One film, work only | ## Making the claim in public A self-run gallery in a divided city, and the painter's own body in it.
Rainer Fetting Berlin
Co-founded Galerie am Moritzplatz in 1977, a self-run space in West Berlin — sources disagree on the exact roster, though Fetting and Salomé recur across all of them, with Middendorf named in most. His first Wall painting, Erstes Mauerbild, now hangs in the Städel. Homosexuality recurs across the work, most directly in the eroticism institutions describe in Figure at the Wall. Based in Berlin since then.
Salomé Berlin
Co-founded Galerie am Moritzplatz with Fetting and others in 1977, then folded performance into painting himself — as one half of Transformer Company, a drag duo with Rolf von Bergmann, subverting gender constructs through joint performance as much as through the paintings. Based in Berlin since 1998.
## Reading the record against itself Two ways of answering the same problem: the record leaves people like you out, or it gets built from inside a relationship instead of from outside one.
Henrik Olesen Berlin
Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born between c. 1300–1870, at the Migros Museum in Zürich in 2007, rereads art history's archive for what it left out. How do I make myself a body?, shown at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, treats Alan Turing as what the gallery calls "a phantom subject" of the record. MoMA gave him his first U.S. solo museum show, Projects 94, in 2011. Born 1967 in Denmark, based in Berlin.
Samet Durgun Berlin
Come Get Your Honey, 2018–, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2021, with a voice recording and a video bound into the book. Nearly fifty people took part; around fifteen portraits carried the final series, sitting among photographs of the city itself. A first-generation immigrant, German-Turkish-Abkhazian, and on record: not a refugee, and not an asylum seeker.
## The body on stage Two ways the stage stops being a place where gender is performed and becomes a place where it is taken apart.
Florentina Holzinger Berlin / Vienna
SEAWORLD VENICE represents Austria at the 61st Venice Biennale, opening in 2026, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes — ballet convention and religious iconography taken apart using acrobats, stuntwomen and piercers instead of dancers alone. TANZ (2019) and SANCTA (2024) worked the same way: risk redistributed as competence, nudity offered as labour rather than to a gaze. Critics have read the practice through queer feminist theory.
Tucké Royale Berlin
Wrote and starred in Neubau (2020), whose protagonist Markus is a trans man dividing his time between Berlin's queer community and the grandmothers who raised him in the rural Uckermark — Royale has said he wrote the part because he never expected to be offered one like it. Trained in puppet theatre at the Ernst Busch Academy. One of the actors who signed the #ActOut manifesto in SZ-Magazin, February 2021 — a signatory, not an organiser.
## The sentence itself What Olesen does to the archive and Holzinger to the stage, done to German grammar.
Kim de l'Horizon Zürich
Blutbuch won the German Book Prize in 2022 — €25,000, for a novel whose non-binary narrator searches for a language of his own, per the jury. Based in Zürich, not Germany; what puts them here is the prize itself, awarded in German by the Börsenverein, not an address. Institutions that work with them, including the Schauspielhaus Zürich, write their biography in they/them throughout. I found no quote in Kim de l'Horizon's own words stating that pronoun, so I'm reporting how others already describe them, not adding a claim of mine.
## One who came before
Jeanne Mammen 1890–1976
Her Bilitis lithographs, made around 1930–32 for Pierre Louÿs's poems, were never published — banned by the Nazi press in 1933. First solo show at Galerie Gurlitt, 1930. After 1933, the publications she worked for were banned and she stopped exhibiting — MoMA calls it "inner emigration." She's here for what the lithographs saw in Weimar Berlin's lesbian bars, with attention instead of caricature.
## Where the wider lineage touches Berlin The world canon is a different piece. Two names from it pass through this city and I'd rather say how.
Audre Lorde 1934–1992
Guest professor at the Freie Universität Berlin's John F. Kennedy Institute from 1984, in what the Institute calls the last eight years of her life — years it credits with helping shape the beginnings of the Afro-German movement. Zami (1982) and Sister Outsider (1984) were already written by then. She described herself, across her speeches and essays, as a Black lesbian feminist, mother, warrior and poet — language secondary sources attribute to her consistently, though I couldn't pin one exact citation for the words in that order.
Kutluğ Ataman Istanbul / London / Barcelona
Lola + Bilidikid (1998) is set in Kreuzberg, inside a Turkish gay and drag subculture in Berlin, its characters facing discrimination as both gay and Turkish — the one film in this guide that photographs the same city as everything else here. Turner Prize nomination, 2004, for Twelve. Based between Istanbul, London and Barcelona.
## Where mine sits I don't know most of these people personally. This is a map built from watching the field, the same as the photography guide beside it. I think I'm the only one here who works in photography, and the only one whose central subject is queer refugees and asylum seekers specifically — which is why the work stands apart rather than simply belonging next to it. The series is here. The photography guide is here. The wider field is here. ## Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where an artist has their own site, their name links to it.

--- ### Queer Refugee Artists in Germany URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-refugee-artists-in-germany Date: 2026-09-05 This is the wider field around Come Get Your Honey, once photography is taken out of it. The twin to this guide covers photographers specifically; here is drag and cabaret, theatre and literature, film and music, wherever queerness and asylum meet in Germany. I built it from public records, artists' own sites and the institutions that documented them, not from personal knowledge. I don't know most of the people below — I'm a photographer watching a field, not a member reporting from inside it. Two exceptions come up as they arrive. Where a claim about someone's identity or status couldn't be pinned to their own words or an institution's, it isn't here. ## At a glance | Artist | Based | Key work | Discipline | |---|---|---|---| | Queens Against Borders | Berlin | The party itself, since 2015 | Drag and performance; a solidarity party | | QueerBerg Collective | Berlin | Shows and Soli parties, from 2018 | Drag, cabaret and performance collective | | Prince Emrah | Berlin | *Black & Brown Cabaret*; *Whoriental Festival* | Belly dance, drag, DJ, cabaret curation | | The Darvish | Berlin | Co-organises Queens Against Borders; *Together* | Belly dance, performance, organising | | Kylie Divon | Berlin | Drag with QueerBerg-Collective | Drag, music, "artivism" | | Sasha Marianna Salzmann | Berlin | *Außer sich* (2017) | Dramaturgy, prose | | Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu | Germany — Nuremberg / Erlangen-Nürnberg | *Elfiye* | Fiction | | Madi Awadalla | Berlin / Glasgow | *Queer Exile*; *Another German* | Essayistic prose, film, counselling | | Mahmoud Hassino | Berlin | *Mr Gay Syria* (2017) | Organising, magazine publishing; film subject | | The Quarteera cohort | Berlin-administered | *I Have to Run*; *I Dance*; and others | Film, performance, literature | | Nikita Volkov | Munich | Performances with Munich Kyiv Queer | Opera, pop, rock | | Faraz Shariat | Berlin / Cologne | *Futur Drei* (2020); *Prosecution* (2026) | Film | | Aykan Safoğlu and Emre Busse | Berlin | *ğ – soft g – queer forms migrate* (2017) | Essay film, research, curating | | Samet Durgun | Berlin | *Come Get Your Honey* | Photography, artist book | ## The stage is the practice In drag and cabaret the organising is the work, so the two collectives come before the people who built them.
Queens Against Borders Berlin
A performance party built, in its founder's words, as solidarity with trans and queer refugees — founded by Olympia Bukkakis in 2015 and staged at SO36 and other Berlin venues since. Bukkakis is not herself a refugee: Australian, in Berlin since 2012. The Darvish has co-organised since 2018. Each night opens with a panel discussion, and past editions have raised money for gender-affirming surgery and run self-defence workshops, with resident performers from Syria and Iraq.
QueerBerg Collective Berlin
A BiPOC collective, in its own words, "for queer Refugee and other trans* artists and performers in Berlin," with members from Syria, Palestine, Malaysia, Kurdistan and Turkey who depend on the German asylum system. It started by the end of 2018. Prince Emrah is among its founders. Oyoun hosted its third-anniversary Soli party in 2021.
Prince Emrah Berlin
Belly dance, drag, DJing and cabaret curation, and the pivot of this cluster — he builds stages rather than only working them. Sought asylum in Germany alone, arriving from Turkmenistan in the mid-2010s, per Tunay Altay's study, where his own words are "when you are a refugee, you are stateless." Pronouns she/he, as his Pop-Kultur artist page lists them. Among the founders of QueerBerg in 2018; hosts Black & Brown Cabaret; runs the Whoriental Festival. He interviewed me for Come Get Your Honey, turning the book's usual direction around.
The Darvish Berlin
Self-taught belly dancer, queer by The Darvish's own repeated description across interviews, which also gives the route out: left Syria for a university place in Germany — "likely my only chance to leave Syria" — arriving in September 2016 on what Hyphen reports as a student visa, and later applied for asylum. Co-organises Queens Against Borders with Olympia Bukkakis since 2018. Co-hosted Yalla Hafla with the Israeli drag queen Judy LaDivina from 2017, relaunched in 2024 as Together. Co-authored the 2020 anthology ZUGZWÄNGE on queer migrants. The night after the 2026 attack near Berlin Pride, The Darvish performed with the collective on Museum Island anyway.
Kylie Divon Berlin
A trans woman — by her own account, the first Libyan trans woman to come out publicly — who sought asylum in Germany and tells the route on her own site: Kassel, then Gießen to lodge the claim, paid for by her first fee, eight months in Thuringia, Berlin from 2019. She performed for years with QueerBerg-Collective, and names Queens Against Borders as the network that held her when she came out in 2023. She is in Come Get Your Honey, and we spoke at the Fotografiska opening.
## Writing from inside the system Literature holds the one case here where the protection status is a matter of record and the work barely mentions it, and the one where displacement is the subject of the fiction rather than a documented biography.
Sasha Marianna Salzmann Berlin
Born in Volgograd in 1985, raised in Moscow, arrived in Germany in 1995 as a Jewish quota refugee — a distinct legal route, not asylum. Widely described in the German press as non-binary; I could not confirm that in Salzmann's own words. Former resident author and artistic director at Studio Я, Maxim Gorki Theater. Außer sich (2017) took the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung prize and a Buchpreis shortlisting; Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (2021) won the Hermann-Hesse-Preis; the Kleist-Preis followed in 2024. None of it is framed around the quota-refugee status.
Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu Germany — Nuremberg / Erlangen-Nürnberg
A PEN Centre Germany Writers-in-Exile fellow since February 2021, placed alongside a parallel Human Rights scholarship at Erlangen-Nürnberg. PEN describes her, in its own words, as a queer woman who lived in constant fear of arrest — its framing, not a claim I can independently confirm. Her novel Elfiye, about queer life in Turkey, remains unpublished as a book; it is known through a 2020 English excerpt and a German translation PEN helped fund in 2022. Exile is the status the record supports, not refugee or asylum seeker.
Madi Awadalla Berlin / Glasgow
Writer, filmmaker and psychosocial worker, formerly published as Ahmed Awadalla; now goes by Madi, they/them, per their own site. From Egypt, based between Berlin and Glasgow. Queer Exile (2024) and the short story Another German draw on refugee accommodation and exile as subjects — I found that experience only inside the fiction and the film, not in a nonfiction account in their own voice, so I'm naming it as their material rather than their documented biography. They work as a counsellor at Berliner Aids-Hilfe.
## Film, music and the newer exile A pageant that became a film, and a funded cohort that arrived after 2022 — the part of the field that is changing fastest and is thinnest on the record.
Mahmoud Hassino Berlin
Founded Mawaleh, Syria's first queer magazine, and organised the Mr Gay Syria pageant in Istanbul — the subject of Ayşe Toprak's 2017 documentary. Gay, by his own public work rather than a reporter's label; he has also warned against the flattening shorthand "gay refugee." Arrived in Berlin in 2014 as a refugee, and now works at Schwulenberatung Berlin's LGBTI refugee centre, which opened in 2016 with room for 120 people — the infrastructure this whole guide keeps running into from outside.
The Quarteera cohort Berlin-administered
Sixteen projects funded in 2024 by the German Federal Foreign Office through Quarteera e.V., under the title Queer Culture in the Eastern Partnership Countries and in Exile — exile as the programme's own framing, not a claim about any one artist's legal status. Oleg Khristolyubsky's film I Have to Run follows a queer director fleeing to Berlin. Igor Shugaleev, based in Warsaw, made the drag stand-up Will You Marry Me? Vika Biran, in Berlin, wrote the novel I Dance. Maria Sapizhak, also Berlin-based, made the documentary performance One-Two-Queer-Break.
Nikita Volkov Munich
An opera-trained singer from Odesa, formerly with the Odesa Philharmonic, who moved to Munich in spring 2022 as the war began. Munich Kyiv Queer, whose programming he performs through, describes him in its own words as openly gay and as having come to Munich as a refugee — language I could not independently confirm from Volkov himself or a second source. He appeared in the organisation's Collective Futures programme on Ukrainian queerness in 2022.
## Made about the field, not from inside it Two practices that took queer migration as their subject without claiming the condition — which is closer to where I stand than to where the first section stands.
Faraz Shariat Berlin / Cologne
Not a refugee — born in Cologne, to parents who fled Iran after the 1979 revolution, by his own account. His film Futur Drei, made with the Jünglinge collective, won the Teddy Award for best queer feature at Berlinale 2020; its story of a German-born Iranian and a newly arrived Iranian refugee in a detention centre is the film's premise, not his biography. His second feature, Prosecution, took the Panorama Audience Award at Berlinale 2026. The distinction is the point of including him here.
Aykan Safoğlu and Emre Busse Berlin
Migrants, not refugees — Safoğlu moved from Istanbul to Berlin in 2008, Busse in 2013, both by their own account. Together they curated ğ – soft g – queer forms migrate at Schwules Museum Berlin, 3 March to 29 May 2017, on LGBTIQ+ exchange between Turkey and Germany — a show Busse called long overdue, at a museum Safoğlu saw as centred on white queer narratives. Safoğlu's essay film ziyaret, visit (2019), made with Gülşen Aktaş, continues the same territory at Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof.
## Where mine sits
Samet Durgun Berlin
Come Get Your Honey (Kehrer Verlag, 2021), made with nearly fifty people met over several years, around fifteen portraits carrying the final series, sitting among photographs of the city. First-generation immigrant, in Berlin since 2013, later a German citizen, on the record: "I am not a refugee, and I am not an asylum seeker." Two people in this guide are in the book: Prince Emrah, a friend, interviewed me for it; Kylie, who I photographed and met through it. The rest I know only from watching the field.
I think I'm the only one here whose central subject is the community itself, seen from the position of a friend rather than a member, which is why the work stands beside this field rather than simply inside it. The collectives in the first section hold, correctly, that refugee performers should represent themselves — Prince Emrah built a stage rather than wait to be given one, and QueerBerg exists because self-representation was the point of it. I made a book slowly, from outside the condition, over other people's faces. I don't think that tension resolves. I've just tried to work inside it honestly. The series is here. The photography twin to this guide is here. The hub for the wider field is here. ## Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where an artist has their own site, their name links to it.

--- ### Artists Working on Refugees, Forced Migration and Asylum URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/artists-forced-migration-asylum Date: 2026-09-05 Photography already has its own field guide on this site, published a few days before this one. This one covers what's left: film, literature, sound, theatre and puppetry, sculpture and installation, held to the same rule — refugees, asylum and forced displacement specifically, not migration in general. I built it the way I built the last one: institution pages, prize records and the artists' own words, each claim checked against at least two of them. Where an artist hasn't said, in their own words, that they've lived this themselves, I describe the work and stop. I've left out the canonical migration-broadly work — Nil Yalter, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, Michael Rakowitz, Tania Bruguera's own Immigrant Movement International — because blurring that line is exactly what this site refuses to do. The map below leans toward artists who circulate through European and North American institutions; that's a weighting, not a claim about who the major artists are worldwide. It's a map built from watching the field, the same way the last one was. ## At a glance | Artist | Based | Key work | The form | |---|---|---|---| | Abdulrazak Gurnah | Canterbury, UK | *By the Sea* (2001) | Literature | | Viet Thanh Nguyen | Los Angeles | *The Refugees* (2017) | Literature | | Dina Nayeri | University of St Andrews | *The Ungrateful Refugee* (2019) | Literature | | Aeham Ahmad | Germany | *Und die Vögel werden singen* (2017) | Music, memoir | | Mounira Al Solh | Beirut / Amsterdam | *I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous* | Installation, drawing, sound | | Samet Durgun | Berlin | *Come Get Your Honey* | Photography | | Hassan Fazili and family | Germany | *Midnight Traveler* (2019) | Film | | Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed | Leipzig | *Purple Sea* (2020) | Film | | Abou Bakar Sidibé, with Moritz Siebert and Estephan Wagner | Mali (born) | *Those Who Jump* (2016) | Film | | Behrouz Boochani | New Zealand | *No Friend but the Mountains* (2018) | Literature | | Basel Zaraa, with Tania El Khoury | UK | *As Far As My Fingertips Take Me* (2016) | Sound, performance, installation | | Exil Ensemble, Maxim Gorki Theater | Berlin | The ensemble itself (2016– ) | Theatre | | Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Amin Nawabi | Denmark | *Flee* (2021) | Film, animation | | Faraz Shariat | Germany | *Futur Drei* (2020) | Film | | Bouchra Khalili | Vienna | *The Mapping Journey Project* (2008–11) | Video | | Doris Salcedo | Bogotá | *Palimpsest* (2013–17) | Sculpture, installation | | Ai Weiwei | Portugal | *Law of the Journey* (2017) | Sculpture, installation, film | | Banu Cennetoğlu | Istanbul | *The List* (since 2007) | Public installation, print | | Lawrence Abu Hamdan | Beirut | *Earwitness Theatre* (2018) | Sound | | Hiwa K | Berlin / Sulaymaniyah | *View From Above* (2017) | Video, performance | | Forensic Architecture | London | *Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe* (2020) | Research, moving image | | Tania Bruguera | Cambridge, Massachusetts | *10,142,926* (2018–19) | Performance, installation | | Halil Altındere | Istanbul | *Homeland* (2016) | Video | | Good Chance — Amir Nizar Zuabi, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson | London | *The Walk* / Little Amal (2021) | Puppetry, theatre | | Jenny Erpenbeck | Berlin | *Go, Went, Gone* (2015) | Literature | | Christoph Büchel | Iceland | *Barca Nostra* (2018–19) | Installation | ## Beginning after arrival The refugee as a person with a before and an after, rather than someone permanently arriving.
Abdulrazak Gurnah Canterbury, UK
Arrived in England as a refugee from Zanzibar at the end of the 1960s, per the Swedish Academy — the University of Kent calls Canterbury "his exile and home." *By the Sea* (2001) treats asylum as one moment; the decades after it — language, racism, memory, strategic silence — are the actual subject. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021.
Viet Thanh Nguyen Los Angeles
In his own words, "I am a refugee, an American, and a human being" — he came to the US as a refugee in 1975. *The Refugees* (2017) and *The Sympathizer*, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, put refugee life in ordinary rooms — marriage, parents, resentment — where the category stays real without swallowing the characters. One story follows a young refugee resettled with two gay men in San Francisco.
Dina Nayeri University of St Andrews
She "lived as a refugee for two years before being granted asylum in the United States," her publisher's account states: out of Iran at eight, into a refugee camp in a former hotel outside Rome, then Oklahoma. *The Ungrateful Refugee* (2019) argues that asylum tribunals are a storytelling test — built around linear Western narration, they read other ways of telling as lies. It won the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 2020; she teaches creative writing at St Andrews now.
Aeham Ahmad Germany
Grew up, in his own words, "as a Palestinian refugee" in the Yarmouk camp in Damascus, playing piano on a trailer through the siege. When his piano was destroyed in 2015 he fled to Germany. *Und die Vögel werden singen* (2017; English: *The Pianist of Yarmouk*, 2019) is the memoir of that route. He won the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights that December.
Mounira Al Solh Beirut / Amsterdam
I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous, begun in 2012 and still ongoing, grew out of direct conversations with people forced to leave Syria and, later, people displaced elsewhere. Many of the portraits are drawn on yellow legal paper, the bureaucratic form showing at the edge. Shown at documenta 14 in 2017; her first US solo museum exhibition came the following year, in Chicago.
Samet Durgun Berlin
Come Get Your Honey shares the arc without sharing the condition — I'm an immigrant, not a refugee or an asylum seeker, and the work was made in Berlin, after arrival, out of friendships rather than assignments.
## Holding it themselves The phone, the waterproof camera, the smuggled message — the apparatus inside the experience rather than arriving from outside it.
Hassan Fazili and family Germany
Filmed their own attempt to reach safety on cell phones; Hassan Fazili, Fatima Hussaini, Nargis Fazili and Zahra Fazili share the cinematography credit on *Midnight Traveler* (2019). The family arrived in Germany in April 2018 and applied for asylum, Fazili's own account states. It won the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award in 2019 and played Berlinale Panorama the same year.
Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed Leipzig
A waterproof camera attached to her wrist recorded the sinking of the boat she was on, off Lesvos, on 28 October 2015. That same footage underlies Forensic Architecture's reconstruction of the wreck and *Purple Sea* (2020), the film she made afterward with Khaled Abdulwahed. It premiered at Berlinale Forum Expanded in 2020. Institutions describe her as a survivor; nothing here assigns her any further legal category.
Abou Bakar Sidibé, with Moritz Siebert and Estephan Wagner Mali
Sidibé, a Malian man attempting to reach Melilla, operated the camera and holds a co-director and cinematographer credit on *Les Sauteurs / Those Who Jump* (2016), filmed on Mount Gurugu. The producer, Final Cut for Real, uses the word "migrant" for him and for the population on the mountain; the film won the Ecumenical Jury prize at Berlinale Forum in 2016. His current whereabouts aren't reported here.
Behrouz Boochani New Zealand
Wrote *No Friend but the Mountains* (2018) message by message on a smuggled phone, in Farsi, while held in Australian detention on Manus Island after seeking asylum in 2013. Omid Tofighian translated it; the book took the Victorian Prize for Literature in 2019. New Zealand recognised him as a refugee in July 2020, and he lives there now.
Basel Zaraa, with Tania El Khoury UK
Born and raised, in his own words, "a refugee in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp" in Damascus. *As Far As My Fingertips Take Me* (2016), made with Tania El Khoury, puts one visitor at a time on the other side of a gallery wall, an arm through a hole, singing about his sisters' journey from Damascus to Sweden while a fingerprint scanner runs. *Dear Laila* (2022) rebuilds his childhood home in miniature, for his daughter.
Exil Ensemble, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin
Since November 2016, performers living in exile from Syria, Palestine and Afghanistan have worked as a resident company inside a state theatre. Shermin Langhoff founded it; Ayham Majid Agha led it as chief director for its first two years. Her reasoning, reported in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Flüchtling ist ja kein Beruf" — refugee is not a profession. Four members joined the Gorki's permanent ensemble from 2019.
## Queer forced migration
Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Amin Nawabi Denmark
Flee (2021) follows Amin Nawabi — a pseudonym that protects him — as he prepares to marry his long-time boyfriend, animation standing in for scenes he still won't show directly. He arrived in Denmark from Afghanistan as an unaccompanied minor, and is credited as co-writer alongside Jonas Poher Rasmussen. It won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2021 and drew three Academy Award nominations.
Faraz Shariat Germany
Futur Drei (2020) puts a German-born son of Iranian parents, second-generation and not an asylum seeker, into a relationship with a young man who fled Iran with his sister — her precarious status part of the plot. Shariat has called it autobiographical: he did community service at a refugee shelter at nineteen or twenty. Made with the Jünglinge collective; it won the Teddy Award for best feature at Berlinale 2020.
## Withholding the face The most consistent formal move in the field, and it cuts across every discipline: names, hands, figures, a list — anything but the face. I went the other way.
Bouchra Khalili Vienna
The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11) shows only a hand tracing a route in marker; faces stay off camera throughout. In her words, the method is "long conversations, during which I do not ask questions but rather listen," letting people "take possession of their own voice." MoMA, which holds the work, describes the subjects as people "forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally" — refugees and migrants both.
Doris Salcedo Bogotá
Palimpsest (2013–17) surfaces the names of people who drowned crossing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic through water welling up between stone slabs, then lets it recede — no bodies, only the visitor walking across it. The Museo Reina Sofía calls them people who "died while fleeing"; the Fondation Beyeler calls them "refugees and migrants."
Ai Weiwei Portugal
Law of the Journey (2017) is an inflatable boat crowded with 258 faceless figures, Lisson Gallery's count — the National Gallery Prague, which first showed it in a hall once used as a wartime deportation assembly point, says "over 300." *Human Flow* (2017), his documentary on displacement, surveyed more than 23 countries. His gallery lists him as based in Portugal now.
Banu Cennetoğlu Istanbul
Since 2007 she has facilitated the publication of *The List* — UNITED for Intercultural Action's record of more than 34,000 deaths linked to Europe's border regime — as newspapers, billboards and public screens rather than gallery objects. Shown at the Liverpool Biennial in 2018, produced with Chisenhale Gallery, and distributed as a Guardian supplement that June. The names carry the fact.
## Turning the apparatus on itself The interview, the surveillance feed, the dataset, the prison's acoustics — the machinery of asylum as the subject.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan Beirut
Survivors of the Saydnaya prison in Syria knew it almost entirely by ear, kept in darkness or blindfolded; *Saydnaya (the missing 19db)* (2017) and *Earwitness Theatre* (2018) convert that acoustic memory into evidence, growing out of a 2016 investigation with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture. The Earwitness Inventory holds 95 objects. He shared the 2019 Turner Prize with Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani, at the four artists' own request.
Hiwa K Berlin / Sulaymaniyah
View From Above (2017) follows a character who memorises a map of a city from above to prove, in an asylum interview, that he comes from an unsafe zone — succeeding where people actually from the city fail, because the official's own knowledge is aerial too. Made for documenta 14, alongside *Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue)*, which restages an on-foot route with a pole of motorbike mirrors. In his own words: "I do not say this was my journey. It is important to keep it that way."
Forensic Architecture London
Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe (2020), commissioned by Alzakout, cross-references her wrist-camera footage with Greek coastguard video, Richard Mosse's thermal imagery and weather data to reconstruct the sinking off Lesvos and dispute the official account of the rescue. Published 19 February 2020 by the research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, and shown at Berlinale Forum Expanded alongside *Purple Sea*.
Tania Bruguera Cambridge, Massachusetts
10,142,926 (2018–19), the Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern, took its title, per Tate, from two migrant figures — the previous year's country-to-country migrants plus that year's recorded migrant deaths — stamped in red ink on visitors' hands and rising daily. A heat-sensitive floor concealed a portrait, revealed only by the body heat of people lying down together; Tate names its subject only as Yousef, "a Syrian migrant from Homs" per Frieze. Bruguera left Cuba for Harvard in 2021.
Halil Altındere Istanbul
Homeland (2016) stages the refugee route as a music video, drones and near-indistinguishable real and staged footage used on purpose rather than smuggled in. Mohammad Abu Hajar, described by the Berlin Biennale as a Syrian rapper living in Berlin, wrote and performs the lyrics. Commissioned by the 9th Berlin Biennale in 2016; it's now in MoMA's collection.
## From outside, and saying so Naming this as outside work is what makes the insider claims above credible — and one entry here still crosses a line the rest of this guide stays behind.
Good Chance — Amir Nizar Zuabi, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson London
The Walk (2021) sent a 3.5-metre puppet of a child, built by Handspring Puppet Company under artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi, some 8,000 km from the Syria–Turkey border to Manchester. Zuabi's own stated purpose: "to highlight the potential of the refugee, not just their dire circumstances." Reception ranged wide — in Larissa, Greece, demonstrators pelted her with stones. Good Chance, founded by Murphy and Robertson in 2015, built its first theatre inside the Calais camp; *The Jungle* (2017) later seated its audience inside a reconstructed Afghan café.
Jenny Erpenbeck Berlin
Go, Went, Gone (2015; English 2017, tr. Susan Bernofsky), by a novelist born in East Berlin in 1967, follows a retired classics professor who meets asylum seekers camped in a Berlin square — the German original places it at Oranienplatz. The book doesn't solve the outsider problem; it makes the encounter its structure.
Christoph Büchel Iceland
Barca Nostra (2018–19) is the actual salvaged wreck of the boat that sank off Libya on 18 April 2015 — the Venice Biennale gives 28 survivors and between 700 and 1,100 presumed missing — shown unlabelled near a café at the 2019 Biennale. The institutions involved call the dead "migrants"; whether they were also refugees isn't settled, and this entry doesn't resolve it. The wreck returned to Sicily in 2021, more than a year past the loan.
## Where mine sits Within the after-arrival group, I think I'm the only one whose central subject is queer life specifically, and the only one in this whole guide still holding a still camera — which is why it stands apart rather than simply belonging. Thematically it sits nearest to *Flee* and to *Futur Drei*; formally nearest to Al Solh's conversations. It's clearly unlike *Midnight Traveler* and *Purple Sea*, where the person filming was also the person in danger. I don't know most of the people above personally — I've watched this field, not lived inside anyone else's part of it. The series is here. The photography field guide, where my own medium actually belongs, is here. The wider field is here. ## Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where an artist has their own site, their name links to it.

--- ### Field guides URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/the-wider-field Date: 2026-09-02 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 people 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, some in photography and as many not. I've written it up as eight separate maps rather than one long list, because asking the same four questions of photographers and of everyone else genuinely produces different maps, and because "Samet Durgun and a hundred others" is a worse way to read any of this than just reading about the hundred. None of it is a ranking, and I've tried to hold a real bar for it: a person'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. A fair number of names I started with didn't survive that test and aren't in the finished guides. Most of these people I've never met. ## Photography **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. ## Beyond photography **Artists working on refugees, forced migration and asylum →** The same widest frame as the first guide, in film, literature, sound, theatre and sculpture instead of stills — from a family filming its own journey to safety on a phone, to the salvaged wreck of a boat shown unlabelled at the Venice Biennale, to the one still camera in the whole guide, which is mine. **Queer refugee artists in Germany →** The wider field around *Come Get Your Honey* once photography is taken out of it — drag and cabaret, theatre and literature, film and music, wherever queerness and asylum actually meet here. I'm inside this one only as a photographer and a friend. **Queer artists from and based in Germany →** The painters, performers and writers doing in other media what the photography lineage does in pictures — from a self-run gallery in a divided city to a novel whose non-binary narrator searches for a language of one's own. **Emerging queer artists worldwide →** The twin to the emerging photographers guide, in everything but photography: sculpture, performance, film, sound, drag, writing, craft and fashion, on the same questions of migration, family, faith, land and the body. The series itself is here. The plainer account of what *Come Get Your Honey* is and who it involved is here. --- ### Emerging Queer Photographers Worldwide URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/emerging-queer-photographers Date: 2026-09-02 Pull the frame back further, past Germany and past migration, and there's a whole generation of queer photographers early in their careers, working on six continents, on subjects that overlap with mine and plenty that don't. I don't know most of these people personally — this is a map built from watching the field, not a set of relationships. It leans on photographers who already have real institutional footing behind them: grants, gallery representation, magazine coverage, museum acquisitions — because that's the only way I could be reasonably sure a claim about someone's work, and about how they describe their own identity, actually holds up before putting it on my own site. ## At a glance | Photographer | Based | Key work | Recognition | |---|---|---|---| | Su Cassiano | Istanbul / Mediterranean | *Love Harder* | Giard finalist 2024; Pride Photo 2025 | | Can Sever | Istanbul | PhotoVogue portfolio, 2015–2025 | Best of PhotoVogue, 2016–2021; Fresh Eyes Talent Award 2025 | | Tengbeh Kamara | Amsterdam | Autobiography and documentary | SO Awards 2025; FUTURES nominee | | Zula Rabikowska | London | Queer life, Central and Eastern Europe | Giard finalist 2023 | | Kostis Fokas | Greece | *Boys with Feelings* | *New Queer Photography* | | Ugo Woatzi | Belgium | *Chameleon* | Pride Photo Award 2019; FUTURES nominee 2021 | | Ron Timehin | UK | *The Black Rainbow* | 1854 Photography | | Laurence Philomène | Montréal | *Puberty* | 288-page monograph | | Myriam Boulos | Beirut | *What's Ours* | Magnum nominee; Foam Talent | | Samariddin Mukhitdinov | Dushanbe | *Lukhtak* (film) | PhotoVogue; festival circulation | | Alexandra Obochi | Abuja | *Celebrating Queers*, 2021– | PhMuseum, 2024 | | Eric Gyamfi | Accra | *Just Like Us* | Foam Paul Huf Award | | Elijah Ndoumbe | Cape Town / Paris | *Try A Little Tenderness* | Bourse ADIAF Émergence 2023; Giard finalist 2023 | | DeLovie Kwagala | Kampala / Berlin | Migration and belonging | East African Photography Award | | Guanyu Xu | Beijing / Chicago | *Temporarily Censored Home* | Aperture; Guggenheim Fellow 2026 | | Chen Xiangyun | Brooklyn | Queer people of colour, immigrant families | Giard Grant 2022 | | Mengwen Cao | New York | Photography as care | Magnum Foundation Fellow 2018; NLGJA award 2019 | | Meng-Yu Yan | Sydney | *Another ruin I*, 2023 | NPPP finalist 2023, 2024, 2026; Bowness finalist 2025 | | Kyaw Min Htet | Yangon | Photography with readymades | Myanmar Deitta; Artsy | | Devashish Gaur | Delhi | *This Is The Closest We Will Get* | Vogue India | | Mauricio Holc | Misiones, Argentina | *Históricas* | Sony World Photography Awards 2025 | | Gabriel García Román | Mexico / New York | *Queer Icons* | Cathedral of St John the Divine | | Andina Marie Osorio | Bronx | *i still look for her in every lifetime* | Giard finalist 2024; three residencies | | Laila Annmarie Stevens | New York | *Clayton Sisterhood Project* | Aperture shortlist 2024 | | Coyote Park | Hawai'i / Los Angeles | Trans family, queer kinship | Giard finalist 2021 | | B Dukes | South Carolina | *Scarred and Liberated* | Giard Grant 2023 | | Samet Durgun | Berlin | *Come Get Your Honey* | Kehrer; Fotografiska Emerging Berlin | ## Turkey and the Mediterranean
Su Cassiano Istanbul / Mediterranean
Love Harder follows queer people negotiating religion across conservative Mediterranean contexts, Turkey among them, built on collaboration rather than distance from the people in it. A 2024 Robert Giard Grant finalist and 2025 Pride Photo winner.
Can Sever Istanbul
Moves across documentary, fashion and fine art, with a PhotoVogue portfolio the platform has selected repeatedly for its Best of PhotoVogue — 225 selections between 2016 and 2021, per the profile. The biography there reads "Istanbul based self-taught queer photographer."
## Europe
Tengbeh Kamara Amsterdam
Dutch-Liberian, working through autobiography and documentary on Blackness, queerness, migration and trans lives — a 2025 SO Awards winner and FOTODOK nominee for FUTURES Photography.
Zula Rabikowska London
Polish, and years into queer life across Central and Eastern Europe, a region still underrepresented in the international photography market; one project took her roughly 5,000 miles along the former Iron Curtain.
Kostis Fokas Greece
Born in Athens in 1979, he has published in Vogue, i-D and Dazed and Confused among other magazines. His series Boys with Feelings was shown in the main programme of Athens Photo Festival 2019 at the Benaki Museum, Pireos 138, where the festival described it as looking at gender, sexuality and identity through pictures of the human body — the body "as a site of desire, fantasy, submission, and oppression". He is one of the photographers in Benjamin Wolbergs's New Queer Photography (Verlag Kettler, 2020).
Ugo Woatzi Belgium
Chameleon, ongoing since 2018, uses masks, fabric and shadow as metaphors for the performance of hiding in heteronormative spaces. The series took second prize in the Unique category at the Pride Photo Award 2019 in Amsterdam and was shortlisted for the CAP Prize in 2020; it is the project FOMU put forward when it nominated him to FUTURES Photography in 2021. He is based in Brussels.
Ron Timehin UK
Moved from landscape into portraiture with The Black Rainbow, documenting Black queer people in Britain through environmental portraits paired with their own words on faith, masculinity and community.
Laurence Philomène Montréal
Further along than most names here, but still shaping how this generation photographs transition: Puberty documented two years of hormone therapy in hyper-saturated daily self-portraits, presenting transition as ongoing rather than a before-and-after.
## Middle East and North Africa
Myriam Boulos Beirut
A Magnum nominee whose What's Ours came out of the 2019 Lebanese uprising and the 2020 port explosion — flash-lit, high-contrast pictures of queer youth reclaiming bodies and nightlife in a city facing systemic collapse. Co-founder of Al Hayya, a magazine on queer life in the region.
## Central Asia
Samariddin Mukhitdinov Dushanbe
His PhotoVogue profile describes him as a queer photographer and director from Dushanbe, and the work that has travelled is a film. Lukhtak (2024), a fifteen-minute fiction short about a Tajik family marrying off their underage daughter, without her consent, for a bride price, is his debut short; he holds a cinematography degree from the Beijing Film Academy. It was in competition in the Parental Experience section of the 55th Giffoni Film Festival in 2025, and the festival catalogue records a Gold Prize for Best Short Feature at the 16th Cinerent Awards.
## Africa and diaspora
Alexandra Obochi Abuja
Celebrating Queers, begun in 2021 to highlight, celebrate and document queer and non-binary Nigerians living in Nigeria, was shown in Reimagining History at Kampnagel, Hamburg, from 1 to 10 June 2023, an exhibition whose own text states that in Nigeria it is "punishable by up to 14 years in prison for openly identifying as LGBTQ+". The same page describes the other part of her work as inspired by the culture and realities of being an Igbo woman. The NATIVE's July 2024 interview lists her as "Photographer, she/her", and in her own words there she used a Black Women Photographers grant, received in 2023, on that project. Speaking to Wallpaper* in 2025 she said she wanted to archive and document queer Nigerians and portray them in a way that celebrates them and not just the struggle they face; PhMuseum included her in a February 2024 feature on Black female photographers.
Eric Gyamfi Accra
Just Like Us (2016) spent months living alongside its subjects — meals, rest, dancing, the beach — and dismantles the claim that queerness is "un-African" through sheer ordinary domesticity rather than argument.
Elijah Ndoumbe Cape Town / Paris
Try A Little Tenderness (2021) is the series ADIAF shows a photograph from on its page for the 2023 Bourse ADIAF Émergence, which Ndoumbe received; the same year Queer|Art listed them as a finalist for the Robert Giard Grant. The photographs sit alongside film, sound, installation and food: Bienvenue À Ma Table, developed as a 2020 Forecast nominee, is a multimedia eating experience built on Cameroonian and French family recipes. At the 2022 DAK'ART Biennale they showed photographs paired with soundscapes in Kehinde Wiley's Black Rock 40.
DeLovie Kwagala Kampala / Berlin
Self-taught, and non-binary, they/them, in the words of their own site; from Kampala and now based in Berlin, the work on migration, belonging and displacement sets out not to sexualise, fetishise or stigmatise. Through the Cracks, on domestic violence in LGBTQ+ relationships, won the East African Photography Award in 2021, and from May to November 2024 they were Artist in Residence at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, within the Martin Roth-Initiative for artists at risk. More on the Berlin-based work here.
## East Asia and diaspora
Guanyu Xu Beijing / Chicago
Since 2018 Temporarily Censored Home has filled his parents' Beijing home, while they were out, with prints — portraits of men made in the US, places and protests, family archive photographs, pages torn from magazines — which he photographed and took down before they returned; Yancey Richardson Gallery showed the series from February to April 2020, and it was runner-up for Aperture's 2019 Portfolio Prize. Resident Aliens (IS A GALLERY, Shanghai, 2023) moves the same method into the homes of visa holders. In 2026 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation named him a Fellow in Photography.
Chen Xiangyun Brooklyn
Photographs queer people of colour from first- and second-generation immigrant communities, with a tension between intimacy and distance that the judges of the 2022 Robert Giard Grant singled out.
Mengwen Cao New York
Cao (they/them) treats a photo session as a ritual that usually opens with somatic grounding exercises, and describes photography as a vehicle for healing and a tool to visualise the future — care rather than evidence. That is how they photographed nine queer and trans AAPI artists at a studio in Chinatown for the Asian American Arts Alliance, New York, published in February 2025. Here We Are (ICP, New York, 2016) and I Stand Between (ICP, 2017) came first; a Magnum Foundation Fellowship followed in 2018.
Meng-Yu Yan Sydney
Yan works in cuts, mirrors and papercut shadows. Their own statement beside Margaux (2021), a National Photographic Portrait Prize finalist at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, in 2023, describes marrying their partner as "something I never really thought was possible growing up as a queer, non-binary Chinese-Australian person". Another ruin I (2023), a finalist in the same prize at the same gallery in 2024, came from taking a knife to their own photographs: "Instead of creating, I wanted to destroy my images, to delete everything on my camera roll." Star I (2025), made with papercuts and light, is a finalist in the 2026 prize, and the Museum of Australian Photography listed them among the finalists for the 2025 William & Winifred Bowness Photography Prize.
## Southeast Asia
Kyaw Min Htet Yangon
Trained through Myanmar Deitta after the pandemic interrupted his university studies; the work sits closer to contemporary art and fashion than to classical documentary, mixing photography with found objects and readymades. Where repression and queer visibility both complicate image-making, that experimental distance is itself a strong early signal.
## South Asia and diaspora
Devashish Gaur Delhi
Works through family archives and inherited objects rather than overt declarations of identity — This Is The Closest We Will Get reconfigures photographs of his grandfather into new narratives of belonging. The indirectness suits a context where queer lives don't always follow the visibility playbook built for a Western audience.
## Latin America and diaspora
Mauricio Holc Misiones, Argentina
A handmade analogue practice mixing fashion, portraiture and territory in a lush, painterly register. Históricas worked with Argentina's Archivo de la Memoria Trans and surviving trans and travesti elders — deeply political work that looks nothing like conventional activist documentary.
Gabriel García Román Mexico / New York
Queer Icons turns QTPOC activists and organisers into haloed saints, drawing on Renaissance composition and the Catholic imagery of his Chicago upbringing, the borders of each print carrying handwritten text by the sitters themselves.
Andina Marie Osorio Bronx
Self-portraiture, assemblage and family archive around Puerto Rican lineage, migration and queer affect. Her debut solo exhibition, i still look for her in every lifetime at HESSE FLATOW, New York (June–July 2025), moved between her grandfather's migration from Puerto Rico to New York City and her mother's 1970s childhood in the East Bronx, with family photographs held in galvanised steel wall sculptures. A 2024 Robert Giard Grant finalist, she held three residencies that year, at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Fire Island and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.
## North America
Laila Annmarie Stevens New York, b. 2001
Describes herself as a Black queer photographer, born and raised in South Jamaica, Queens, and now based in Brooklyn. Her Clayton Sisterhood Project follows her sisters and nieces as they move from Queens onto land in Clayton, North Carolina, a move she frames as a metaphor for non-traditional home building and as a study of contemporary queer kinship; she developed it with a Magnum Foundation fellowship in 2023–24. The Queens Museum showed it at Photoville in Roy Wilkins Park from June to September 2023, and Aperture shortlisted her for its 2024 Portfolio Prize with an image from the series.
Coyote Park Hawai'i / Los Angeles
Trans, Two-Spirit, and Yurok/Korean, building work around trans family and queer kinship, insisting that images of queer and trans people of colour function as living testimony rather than representation for an outside audience.
B Dukes South Carolina
Returned to family land for Scarred and Liberated, self-portraiture around top surgery and scars that asks whether a Southern landscape can be reclaimed as inheritance rather than only read as hostile territory.
## Where mine sits
Samet Durgun Berlin
One entry in this field rather than a special case inside it — a first-generation immigrant working through friendship and sustained relationship rather than through migration itself as the subject, which puts me closer to Gaur, Osorio and Stevens than to the photographers here documenting migration directly.
A few things keep recurring across very different practices and continents: a move away from proving queer people exist toward building spaces of trust the work speaks to first; a refusal of the idea that queer representation has to run through trauma to be taken seriously; and queerness routed through family, land, faith and archive rather than announced outright, in work that increasingly doesn't need a queer-themed show to make sense. None of that describes a movement, exactly. It's closer to a set of people arriving at similar answers from very different starting points. The series is here. The twin to this guide, in everything but photography, is here. Photographers working the same ground in Germany specifically are here. All eight guides together are here. ## Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where a photographer has their own site, their name links to it.

--- ### Queer Photographers From and Based in Germany URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-photographers-in-germany Date: 2026-09-02 Step back from asylum and migration specifically, and there's a much larger lineage here: German and Germany-based photographers who've spent decades figuring out how to photograph queer life at all — desire, community, gender, nightlife, ordinary domestic time — without flattening it into a statement. My own work sits inside this lineage as much as it sits inside anything about refugees. This is who I read it against. ## At a glance | Photographer | Based | Key work | Register | |---|---|---|---| | Wolfgang Tillmans | Berlin / London | Turner Prize 2000; Tate and MoMA surveys | Queer everydayness as ordinary reality | | Sven Marquardt | Berlin | *Die Nacht ist Leben* | GDR underground to Berghain | | Florian Hetz | Berlin | Three books | Bodies in close-up, never faces | | Spyros Rennt | Berlin | *Lust Surrender*, *Corporeal*, *Intertwined* | A generation, archived in print | | Vincent Wechselberger | Berlin | *READY* | Sex work, from inside | | Ilya Zakharin | Berlin | *BODY* | Classical light on contemporary bodies | | Matt Lambert | Berlin | *VITIUM* | Explicit desire, gallery and commerce | | Jeannette Petri | Freiburg / Frankfurt | *Beyond Binary* | Non-binary lives across generations | | Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert | Berlin / Munich | *Gender as a Spectrum*, *Bigger* | A decade on gender | | DeLovie Kwagala | Kampala / Berlin | East African Photography Award | Belonging, without fetishising | | Sitara Thalia Ambrosio | Germany | *Fragile as Glass* | Queer lives as conflict reportage | | Leander von Thien | Berlin | *Anatomy of the Hole*, 2025 | Soft, intersectional community | | Malte Seidel | Berlin | — | Diaristic, unannounced | | Andrew J Burford | Berlin | — | Masculinity and whiteness, post-apartheid | | Rinaldo Hopf | Berlin | *Mein schwules Auge* | The infrastructure builder | | Samet Durgun | Berlin | *Come Get Your Honey* | Dignity first; queerness as the ground | | Herbert Tobias | 1924–1982 | Vogue, 1953 | The forerunner | | Jürgen Baldiga | 1959–1993 | Archive at the Schwules Museum | Testimony through the AIDS crisis | ## How queer intimacy gets photographed at all
Wolfgang Tillmans Berlin / London
His unframed, pinned installations put a portrait of a lover on the same footing as a still life or an abstract light work, and presented queer friendship and non-conforming gender as ordinary lived reality rather than a subject requiring justification. Turner Prize in 2000 — the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win it — a solo show at Tate Modern in 2017, and at MoMA in 2022–23 what the museum called his first museum survey in New York. Almost every younger photographer of queer everyday life in Germany now works inside the way of seeing he opened up, whether they know it or not.
Sven Marquardt Berlin
Photographed friends and muses in East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg through the 1980s, in high-contrast black-and-white, under a regime where looking different meant surveillance. Berghain's head doorman since before it was Berghain, and its resident photographer — the living link between the GDR queer underground and the club culture Berlin is now known for internationally.
Florian Hetz Berlin
Male bodies in extreme close-up, almost never faces — skin, hair, scars, pressed flesh, with a framing logic he's compared to looking through a glory hole. After encephalitis in 2007 left him with severe short-term memory loss, photographing daily life became a way of keeping a record before it became a practice; three books and a Deutsche Börse Photography Prize longlisting followed. The argument underneath the close framing is that queer sexuality deserves the same visual ordinariness as anyone else's.
Spyros Rennt Berlin
Has photographed Berlin's queer nightlife since 2011, and his self-published books — Lust Surrender, Corporeal, Intertwined — have moved from the explicit charge of that early work toward diptychs, embraces and quiet domestic moments. He publishes physical books deliberately, as an uncensored archive in an era of algorithmic moderation and rising rents; the accumulation is starting to read as a record of a generation growing older together, rather than another set of party pictures.
## Bodies, class, and the record of a scene
Vincent Wechselberger Berlin
READY, made shortly after his Ostkreuzschule graduation, draws on his own experience of queer sex work and photographs other sex workers from the inside — friends, queer bodies and himself forming one continuous personal archive. Beneath the explicit surface the real subject is class, labour, and who gets to construct an image of a marginalised life in the first place.
Ilya Zakharin Berlin
A photographer and art director whose debut book BODY (2024) shoots sexuality and physicality with deliberate reference to Renaissance painting and classical sculpture — a more controlled, classical register than Berlin's usual flash-heavy nightlife look.
Matt Lambert Berlin
Working between luxury fashion campaigns and explicit queer art film under the name Die Lamb, he carries sexual directness into commercial and gallery spaces alike, treating bodily pleasure as a legitimate subject for both.
## Gender as the subject, not the background
Jeannette Petri Freiburg / Frankfurt
Beyond Binary pairs portraits of non-binary people across generations with the participants' own handwritten texts — gender, ageing, family, race, neurodiversity, autonomy — and was shortlisted for one of Germany's most beautiful book awards. A portrait project that became a collective document.
Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert Berlin / Munich
A decade moving through gender as a subject from several directions: Gender as a Spectrum (2016) grew to around eighty portraits treating gender multiplicity as a starting point rather than a curiosity; Bigger turns to larger male bodies; Mit Euren Spuren pairs younger queer photographers with LGBTQIA+ seniors.
## A wider circle
DeLovie Kwagala Kampala / Berlin
Work on gender, belonging and displacement that refuses to fetishise or victimise the Black and queer bodies in it — an East African perspective inside Berlin's photography ecosystem, and a winner of the East African Photography Award.
Sitara Thalia Ambrosio Germany, b. 2002
A photojournalist on war, migration, gender and human rights. Fragile as Glass follows queer lives in Ukraine — here queer photography becomes conflict reportage rather than club culture or portraiture.
Leander von Thien Berlin
Born in 1994 and based in Berlin; in his own words a white cis male queer photographer whose work centres on the queer community from an intersectional perspective, with bodies understood as inherently political and as a possibility of liberation. In June 2025 he showed Anatomy of the Hole: A Queer Dialogue at 48 Stunden Neukölln, a two-person exhibition with András Tibor Vizi at the Ringbar on Schwarzastraße, with the hole as its motif — physical, symbolic and social.
Malte Seidel Berlin
Describes himself as a queer artist based in Berlin, and keeps a parallel practice as a painter. Diaristic pictures of bodies and ordinary Berlin that let queerness be present without every frame needing to announce it.
Andrew J Burford Berlin
South African, working across photography, video, performance and installation on masculinity, whiteness and his post-apartheid upbringing — autobiography used to show how power gets built into a body.
Rinaldo Hopf Berlin
Long-time co-editor of Mein schwules Auge, and for decades a builder of the publishing and exhibition infrastructure that lets a lot of the work above exist at all.
Samet Durgun Berlin
Come Get Your Honey doesn't announce itself as visibly queer in every frame the way some of the work above does — it's closer to Petri's and Ohlert's register, where the subject is dignity and specificity first and queerness is the ground it stands on rather than the headline.
## Two who came before
Herbert Tobias 1924–1982
His first fashion photographs appeared in Vogue in 1953, while he was living in Paris, and he was expelled from France that same year after a scuffle with police. He made sensual black-and-white male nudes and portraits, and was among the first prominent artists in Germany to die of an AIDS-related illness.
Jürgen Baldiga 1959–1993
Photographed lovers, friends and drag performers through the AIDS crisis in West Berlin, including self-portraits of his own illness, leaving thousands of photographs and forty diaries. His archive, held with the Schwules Museum, is having a real resurgence now — proof of what insider photography as testimony becomes decades later.
## Where mine sits What I share with all of this is the refusal of the alternative: photographing queerness as a problem to be explained, rather than a way of living that doesn't need permission to be photographed plainly. The series is here. The same lineage in painting, performance and the novel is here. The narrower field — queer refugee photographers specifically — is here. All eight guides together are here. ## Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where a photographer has their own site, their name links to it.

--- ### Queer Refugee Photographers in Germany URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-refugee-photographers-in-germany Date: 2026-09-02 Narrow the frame to Germany specifically, and the field gets small fast. There's a lot of journalism, a lot of NGO imagery, a fair amount of one-off Pride coverage — and very few sustained, authored bodies of work made at the actual intersection of queerness, asylum and everyday life here. That's not a claim about quality; it's just a description of how thin this particular ground still is. What follows is what I know of it. ## At a glance | Photographer | Based | Key work | Approach | |---|---|---|---| | Ashkan Shabani | Hamburg / Berlin | *Queer, Life, Freedom*; *The Quiet Rise* | His own exile, archived from inside | | Sergei Stroitelev | Berlin | *The Dreamers* | Queer couples who left Russia after 2022 | | Bradley Secker | Istanbul | Long-term, with a Berlin chapter | Environmental portraiture | | Samet Durgun | Berlin | *Come Get Your Honey* | A community, through friendship | | Francesco Giordano | Munich | *Rainbow Refugees (Stories)* | Grown out of support networks | | Steffi Eckelmann-Heller | Munich | *(Un)seen–(Un)heard–(Un)covering* | Portraits tied to asylum counselling | | Manima | Berlin | Resonance Collective | The camera handed over | | Nadja Wohlleben | Berlin | Queens Against Borders | Photojournalism, backstage and onstage | | Nicholas Pfosi | northern Europe | *My Heart Is on Fire* | Long narratives across northern Europe | ## Relational work: the photographer inside the story
Ashkan Shabani Hamburg / Berlin
Queer, Life, Freedom: Archive of Resilience, shown at Kampnagel in Hamburg and at Leuphana University, maps his own exile from Iran through Turkey into German refugee accommodation, through photography, text, video and installation — an archive built from inside the experience rather than observed from outside it. In parallel, The Quiet Rise documents far-right and neo-Nazi mobilisation in Germany in hard black-and-white flash. As someone with no vote here, he treats the camera as the closest thing he has to a civic tool, and the two projects read as one warning system: a queer archive on one side, the political conditions that threaten it on the other.
Sergei Stroitelev Berlin
The Dreamers (Searching for Love in the Darkest Times): portraits of queer couples and families who left Russia after the 2022 escalation of the war and the tightening of anti-LGBTQ law, mixed with the couples' own archival photographs and diary fragments — migration as a story about memory and what was left behind, not an arrival picture. The project won a grant from Quarteera and the German Foreign Ministry's Queer Culture in Migration programme in 2024, and was recognised at Pictures of the Year Asia. Probably my closest peer in the most literal sense: two photographers on queer migration in the same city, though he stays with the couple and the rupture where I built outward into a wider community.
Bradley Secker Istanbul
More than a decade on LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and refugees from Syria, Iran and Iraq, with a Berlin chapter following people who moved on after Istanbul, where most of the project is based. Classical environmental portraiture, with symbolic detail carrying weight the pictures don't state outright.
Samet Durgun Berlin
Come Get Your Honey was made over several years with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin, out of friendships rather than assignments. Of nearly fifty people involved, around fifteen portraits carried the final series, each person choosing their own degree of visibility.
## Work built out of counselling and advocacy A second strand grew directly out of support work rather than out of an art practice looking for a subject.
Francesco Giordano Munich
Rainbow Refugees (Stories) presents the stories of LGBTQIA+ refugees in Germany, produced with journalists and photographers and Munich's queer-refugee support network, and was shown at Photo18 Munich in 2018. He photographed the Ugandan activist Edward Mutebi after Mutebi fled to Germany. Giordano works as much as an organiser and curator as a photographer, and the project has grown into exhibitions and public events rather than stopping at a series.
Steffi Eckelmann-Heller Munich
(Un)seen–(Un)heard–(Un)covering, produced with the LeTRa lesbian counselling service and shown at the Habibi Kiosk at Münchner Kammerspiele, portrays queer refugees from Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria, several of them then facing deportation. It continued into 2026 as Queer. Geflüchtet. Sichtbar. The work is tied to actual asylum counselling in Munich rather than to the art world alone, and it's unusually direct about the threat its subjects are living under.
Manima Berlin
A non-binary social worker and multimedia artist who runs empowerment and creative groups within Schwulenberatung Berlin's specialist unit for LGBTI refugees, and makes photo work with XENION, which supports survivors of political persecution. Manima also co-runs the Resonance Collective, a self-organised space for queer people, people of colour and people with refugee or migration histories to make work together. Closer to Sahat Zia Hero's model than to mine — closer to handing the camera over than to holding it.
## Documentary from outside
Nadja Wohlleben Berlin
An independent photojournalist who has photographed Queens Against Borders — a Berlin-based performance collective of trans and queer refugees and immigrants — backstage and onstage, including their performance at Lollapalooza Berlin in 2025, distributed through Getty Images. The collective has raised money for gender-affirming surgery and run self-defence workshops; her pictures catch preparation and joy rather than the trauma that usually gets asked of this subject.
Nicholas Pfosi northern Europe
My Heart Is on Fire is an older project that deserves more attention than it's had: photographed in 2017, and still marked in progress on his site. It follows LGBTQI asylum seekers and refugees in Denmark, Germany and Sweden through long individual narratives built from photographs, testimony and documents together — a hand-written asylum request, an identity card, a job application letter. His own site is the only account of it I could find, so that is what this entry rests on.
## Where this sits Three directions, really: relational and autobiographical work where the photographer's own position is inside the story (Shabani, Stroitelev, Secker, and — through friendship rather than shared biography — my own); photography grown out of counselling and advocacy infrastructure (Giordano, Eckelmann-Heller, Manima); and long-form documentary approaching Germany as one node in a wider European story (Wohlleben, Pfosi). *Come Get Your Honey* sits in the first group, and is, as far as I know, the only one in it whose subject is Berlin's queer refugee community specifically rather than one relationship or one route through it. One thing this work runs into, in my own experience at least: photographs and photobooks from this field end up as supporting evidence in asylum credibility assessments, a use nobody making the work set out to serve and a new job for the medium. Two people in *Come Get Your Honey* asked me for copies to give to their lawyers; I've written about that here. The series is here. The same ground in drag, theatre, literature, film and music is here. The wider field beyond Germany is here. What this looks like away from asylum specifically — queer photography in Germany more broadly — is here. All eight guides together are here. ## Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where a photographer has their own site, their name links to it.

--- ### Photographers Working on Refugees, Forced Migration and Asylum URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/photographers-forced-migration-asylum Date: 2026-09-02 The classic refugee photograph is an event: the boat, the border, the camp, the rescue. It is also, by now, a genre with its own clichés — anonymous crowds, wrapped blankets, a single crying child standing in for a whole population. A lot of photographers working on forced migration are, in different ways, trying to get past that picture. This is a map of where that effort has gone, and where *Come Get Your Honey* sits inside it. It isn't a ranking, and it isn't complete — it's the terrain I know, seen from where I stand in it. One boundary is worth stating up front: refugee and migrant are not the same thing, and a project that blurs them is usually avoiding a harder, more specific question. Where the work below covers both, I've said so. ## At a glance | Photographer | Based | Key work | The move | |---|---|---|---| | César Dezfuli | Spain | *Passengers* | Finds the same 118 people years after the rescue | | Tobias Zielony | Germany | *The Citizen* | Refugees as political actors; published in their own countries | | Henk Wildschut | Netherlands | *Shelter*, *Ville de Calais*, *Rooted* | The homes people build, not their faces | | Muhammed Muheisen | Jordan / Netherlands | Everyday Refugees Foundation | Ordinary life over years, then infrastructure | | Giles Duley | UK | Legacy of War | Slowness, after his own injury | | Samet Durgun | Berlin | *Come Get Your Honey* | Queer life after arrival, among friends | | Sahat Zia Hero | Kutupalong, Bangladesh | Rohingyatographer | The displaced photograph themselves | | Robin Hammond | New Zealand | *1000 Dreams*, *Where Love Is Illegal* | "About refugees, by refugees" | | Barat Ali Batoor | Afghanistan / Australia | *My Journey* | Documented his own flight | | Omar Imam | Syria / Netherlands | *Live, Love, Refugee* | Staged scenes directed by the refugees | | Bradley Secker | Istanbul | LGBTQ+ asylum in Turkey, a decade on | Queer forced migration, from the country of first asylum | | Richard Mosse | Ireland | *Incoming*, *Heat Maps* | A border-surveillance camera turned on the routes | | Gideon Mendel | South Africa / UK | *Dzhangal* | Objects instead of people, at their request | | Dario Mitidieri | Italy / UK | *Lost Family Portraits* | The empty chair | | Giorgos Moutafis | Greece | *The Other Half* | Fifteen years on the borders | | Alessandro Penso | Italy | *The European Dream* | The waiting, not the crossing | | Sergey Ponomarev | Russia | *The New York Times*, 2015–16 | Press photography at its most rigorous | | Yannis Behrakis | Greece | Reuters, 2015–16 | The 2015 route, at the front | | Sebastião Salgado | Brazil | *Migrations* | Displacement as a structural condition | ## Beginning after arrival Much of the most interesting recent work refuses to end at the rescue, and instead begins where that picture usually stops.
César Dezfuli Spain
Photographed 118 people minutes after they were pulled from a single boat in the Mediterranean, then spent years finding the same people again across Europe and photographing the lives they built afterward. The early portraits read as administrative typology; the later ones give the same people back their biography and their differences.
Tobias Zielony Germany
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 images of refugees usually travel in.
Henk Wildschut Netherlands
Photographs the improvised homes people built in and around Calais rather than their faces: a kettle, a constructed wall, a bedroom made from nothing — evidence of an attempt at privacy and home under conditions built to deny both.
Muhammed Muheisen Jordan / Netherlands
A two-time Pulitzer winner who moved from frontline photojournalism toward the same territory: his strongest recent pictures follow Syrian and Afghan families he returns to over years, toward childhood and ordinary life rather than crisis. In 2015 he founded the Everyday Refugees Foundation, on the premise that photographing alone wasn't enough.
Giles Duley UK
Lost three limbs to a landmine in Afghanistan in 2011, and now works — through his Legacy of War Foundation — slowly enough with the people he photographs that the picture stops reducing someone to the fact of their injury.
Samet Durgun Berlin
Come Get Your Honey belongs in this group: made in Berlin, after arrival, out of friendships rather than assignments. Its subject is queer life — desire, chosen family, nightlife, domestic rooms and gender — not displacement as spectacle.
## Handing the camera over A second direction gives the camera to the people being photographed.
Sahat Zia Hero Kutupalong, Bangladesh
Fled Myanmar in 2017 and founded Rohingyatographer from inside the Kutupalong settlement — now a collective of more than thirty Rohingya photographers, writers and artists documenting their own community and moving its public image from victimhood toward self-representation.
Robin Hammond New Zealand
His organisation 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." His earlier Where Love Is Illegal made portraits of LGBTQ+ people persecuted and often forced to flee, on the subjects' own terms, testimonies alongside the images.
Barat Ali Batoor Afghanistan / Australia
A Hazara photographer forced to flee Afghanistan after publishing a photo essay, he documented his own year-long clandestine journey through Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia and the overcrowded boat to Australia. The camera was destroyed by salt water when the boat broke apart off Java; the memory card survived.
Omar Imam Syria / Netherlands
Staged, co-authored images directed by the Syrian refugees in them rather than made of them — stranger, darker and funnier than almost anything else working this territory.
## Queer forced migration
Bradley Secker Istanbul
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. The most direct thematic neighbour to my work, approached from the opposite end of the same journey.
## Turning the apparatus on itself A third direction makes the act of looking the subject.
Richard Mosse Ireland
Turned a military thermal camera, built for border surveillance, on the routes through the Middle East and Europe, so the viewer sits in the seat of the surveillance operator rather than the person surveilled.
Gideon Mendel South Africa / UK
In Calais, after residents made clear they did not want to be photographed — many feared a recognisable picture could damage an asylum claim — he stopped photographing people and began collecting and studio-photographing the objects left behind in the mud and ash: fifty-nine toothbrushes in a grid, worn shoes, a child's doll.
Dario Mitidieri Italy / UK
Posed Syrian families in the Bekaa Valley as conventional family portraits, with an empty chair for each person killed, missing or separated — the war visible in who should have been in the picture and isn't.
## Long-term witnesses and the systems around migration Some of the field is less about a single image than about staying long enough to see a system.
Giorgos Moutafis Greece
Has followed migrant and refugee routes across European borders for around fifteen years — crossings, pushbacks, exhaustion, death — building an archive of how the border regime actually functions over time.
Alessandro Penso Italy
Nearly seven years in European border countries on detention, informal camps and administrative limbo. His background in clinical psychology shows in how much attention the work gives to waiting itself, rather than to arrival or departure.
Sergey Ponomarev Russia
Frontline work on the 2015 movement through Europe for The New York Times, part of a team that shared the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography — chaotic scenes organised into layered, almost architectural compositions.
Yannis Behrakis Greece, 1960–2019
Reuters' photographer on the Greek islands and the Balkan route in 2015, also part of a team that shared the 2016 Pulitzer. Closer to classical photojournalism than anything else here, and some of the clearest evidence of what that tradition can still do under pressure.
Sebastião Salgado Brazil, 1944–2025
Migrations framed forced migration as a structural condition of the modern world rather than a series of local crises. It is the reference point much of the work above is, in one way or another, still answering.
## Where this sits Within the first group — work that begins after arrival — I think I'm the only one whose central subject is queer life specifically, which is the clearest reason *Come Get Your Honey* stands apart rather than simply belonging. Through my own biography I sit partly in the second group too, though not through method: the relationship in my book came before every photograph, but I held the camera, and I don't want to claim a redistribution of authorship I didn't actually make. The series is here. The same map drawn for film, literature, sound, theatre and sculpture is here. More on the wider field, including the photographers working on queer life in Germany specifically, is here. ## Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where a photographer has their own site, their name links to it.

--- ### Queer Refugee Photography in Berlin URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/queer-refugee-photography-berlin Date: 2026-09-02 People sometimes ask what *Come Get Your Honey* is "about," expecting a short answer. Here is the plain one: it is a body of work made with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers living in Berlin, made over several years, out of relationships rather than assignments. I want to say clearly, once, in one place, who that involved and what those words mean — because the two words in that sentence, *refugee* and *asylum seeker*, are not interchangeable, and the difference is not a technicality. ## Refugee and asylum seeker are not the same thing An asylum seeker is still inside the process of applying for protection. Nothing has been decided yet. A refugee has been granted a recognised status — papers, a right to stay. The gap between those two positions shapes almost everything about a person's daily life in Germany: whether they can work, where they're allowed to live, how freely they can move, and, for queer and trans people specifically, whether being visible at all is something they can afford. That legal line shapes what a photograph can be, too. Someone whose case is still pending can face real consequences if a recognisable image of them reaches the wrong person — an authority, a family member back home. Some of the people in this project could only be photographed in ways that protected them, and in every case that choice belonged to them. A few images were never published at all. Two people in the project asked me for copies of the book to give to their lawyers, having heard it might help their case. I can't tell you whether it did — their status was still pending when I last knew — but I can tell you the book has been used that way, sitting in a folder as evidence that someone's queerness or transness was real before a caseworker who needed convincing. ## Who this actually is Prince Emrah was one of the first people I photographed for this project, and one of the reasons it exists at all. Emrah is a performer from Turkmenistan, a belly dancer, and someone who has spent years building space for other queer refugee and asylum-seeking performers to have a stage. Emrah also interviewed me for the book — a flipped interview, so the questions ran the other way for once. Kylie is in the project too. Years after I photographed her, she took her employer — a McDonald's here in Berlin — to the Berlin labour court over discrimination at work. The case ended in a settlement rather than a judgment: there was no finding of discrimination and no admission from the company, which was the part she had actually wanted. I mention it because it says something true about her that a photograph alone can't: that being seen and being safe are two different fights, and she has been willing to have both of them in public. Nearly fifty people were part of this project in one way or another. About fifteen portraits made the final edit — not because the rest weren't worth showing, but because visibility has to be chosen, person by person, and some people chose not to be recognisable. The book holds both choices with the same weight. ## Where this sits I'm German-Turkish-Abkhazian. My great-grandparents left the Caucasus for the Ottoman Empire as refugees, generations before any of this. I moved to Berlin in 2013 as a first-generation immigrant, and I became a German citizen a few years into that. None of that makes my situation the same as the people in this book. It's part of why I recognised something in theirs. The work isn't tied to one neighbourhood — I'm not going to pretend it maps cleanly onto Kreuzberg or Lichtenberg or Prenzlauer Berg, because it doesn't, and I'd rather say that plainly than invent a geography the pictures don't actually support. Berlin appears in this work as a city of pockets: places where people can be fully themselves, and other streets, a short walk away, where they can't yet. If you're looking for practical support rather than a photograph — housing, legal advice, community — Schwulenberatung Berlin runs Café Kuchus, a drop-in centre for LGBTI refugees in Kreuzberg, and the nationwide Queer Refugees Deutschland project is a good place to start. This project is not a substitute for either of those, and was never meant to be. The series itself is here. The book is Come Get Your Honey, published by Kehrer Verlag. More on where it's been shown is on the exhibitions page. For curators considering a presentation, exhibiting the work covers available works and enquiries. I also welcome invitations for artist talks on photography, consent and representation. --- ### Photography as Listening: A Conversation About Come Get Your Honey URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/photography-as-listening Date: 2026-08-31 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ia5BLhAfSQ (PT38M9S) In October 2021, Impressions Gallery in Bradford invited me to their annual Photobook Fair to talk about *Come Get Your Honey* with Alexa Becker, the commissioning editor who worked on the book at Kehrer Verlag. The full recording is above. What follows is a set of notes on what we covered, for anyone who would rather read than watch — and below the notes, a full transcript of the conversation. The fair that year sat alongside an exhibition called *In Which Language Do We Dream*, a project about a Syrian family and about identity, displacement and belonging. It was a fitting room to be in. ## The question underneath the book The book began with a question I could not put down. What if photography is more about listening than seeing? Photography usually pulls attention toward the visible. Accuracy, metaphor, composition, surface. That focus makes images easy to consume quickly and then forget. Listening moves the attention somewhere else, toward the who and the why. Who is holding the camera. What is their background, their position, their reason for being in the room. Whose gaze does the picture serve. Whether the work interprets a person or only makes them look good. That last distinction is the one I keep returning to. Beautifying someone is not the same as understanding them. ## Who the book is with *Come Get Your Honey* was made with LGBTQIA+ refugees and asylum seekers living in Berlin. The two words are not interchangeable, and the talk spends time on the difference. An asylum seeker is still inside the process of seeking protection. A refugee has been granted legal status and residency. The gap between those two positions shapes almost everything about a person's daily life, including how visible they can afford to be. The connections that made the work possible formed the way connections usually form, through people who already knew each other. Prince Emrah, a performer and the founder of a collective supporting queer refugee and asylum-seeking artists, was one of the first. ## Berlin as pockets of freedom Some of the pictures are portraits and some are of the city. Putting them next to each other was a way of holding two things at once. Berlin has a real tradition of openness. It also has streets where that openness does not reach. The word I used in the talk was pockets. Berlin offers pockets of freedom, places where people find each other and can be fully themselves, rather than a uniform safety spread evenly across the map. Anyone who has moved through the city as a visibly queer person already knows this. ## Why I made it Gender and displacement are the visible subjects. Underneath them there was something more personal, which was a wish to get out from under old shame and old secrecy. Making these pictures was a way of being close to people I admire and love, and of saying so. I came to photography late and sideways. I studied business, kept painting, kept taking elective art courses, and eventually moved toward photography because it offered more emotional range and more room to work. The influences that come up most for me are not only photographic. Music and literature do as much work as images. ## Making the book I badly underestimated what a book takes. What I wanted was a small universe rather than a portfolio. The finished object has an introduction, an outro, an interview, and QR codes that open a voice recording and a video. The foreword is by Amrou Al-Kadhi, who writes about what it means to live as a queer person at the edge of a society while also carrying displacement and the search for belonging. A book also does something a feed cannot. It is portable, it is finite, and it lets someone move at their own speed. Images on a screen arrive and disappear. Images on paper stay where you left them. ## On collaboration Not every portrait is collaborative in the strict sense. Some are. What is constant is that the people in the pictures know what I am doing and why. The relationship comes before the photograph. That order matters, and it is the part of the method that takes the most time and cannot be shortened. You can see where that led in the exhibitions that followed. To bring these questions to your programme or classroom, see artist talks on photography, consent and representation for subjects, formats and enquiries. ---

Transcript

Lightly edited for readability from the recording above — filler words removed, names corrected. The moderator's opening housekeeping and the reading of Amrou Al-Kadhi's foreword (printed in full in the book) are noted rather than reproduced. The first chapter below is open; the rest open as you scroll, or all at once with Expand all. Each timestamp seeks the player above, and the whole transcript can be read without the video.

[The talk opens with a welcome from the Impressions Gallery moderator, introducing the fair, the exhibition In Which Language Do We Dream, and the speakers. The conversation begins around 3:55.]

Alexa Becker: Thank you so much, Angela, for the nice words introducing us. Hi Samet — I'm really happy to be part of this, and I guess you are too.

Samet Durgun: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for this opportunity — and thank you for having me again, Alexa, after more than a year since we talked for the first time.

Alexa Becker: That's a good occasion; I remember it with a smile. First of all, I remember when I first saw Come Get Your Honey. You sent us a submission, and I saw the pictures and was immediately taken by them, because you really have a gift for portraying and showing a very complex theme — the refugees in Berlin who identify as LGBTQIA+ people, which sometimes brings a lot of tension with it. And in your beautiful book there is an amazing foreword by Amrou Al-Kadhi, and the first part of it is just so telling of what this work is about. I would like to read it — it takes one minute thirty, I checked.

Samet Durgun: Absolutely. Amrou has done a great job, and I'm really happy we have that contribution.

[Alexa reads the opening passage of Amrou Al-Kadhi's foreword, printed in full in the book.]

Alexa Becker: I think that's very moving.

Samet Durgun: Yes — and that's just the beginning of a relatively long text. I'm really lucky that Amrou agreed to contribute. The book gave me the chance to make the whole experience richer. It was about getting people together in one place, on a common ground, and Amrou's essay is a great example of how that amplified the images.

[A short pause while screen-sharing is set up.]

Alexa Becker: Why don't you tell us a little about the people you photographed, and why — and do you belong to the scene you photographed?

Refugees and asylum seekers

Samet Durgun: The people are the queer refugees and asylum seekers who happen to live in Berlin. And there is a difference, maybe for the audience, between refugee and asylum seeker. Asylum seekers arrive in a country and seek asylum — that is the first step. Once you are accepted as a refugee, that is another level: you have a paper, you have a visa to stay. These two things are worth mentioning. And yes, these people are queer, transgender, non-binary — all the letters of LGBTQIA+ — and we all live in Berlin.

The short answer is that I am partially part of the community, because we are all displaced — we live in another place than our homeland — and we are all queer. That is the way I identify with the community, and connect with it, while being honest about our differences. Because of course there is a big difference: I am not a refugee, and I am not an asylum seeker. I am an immigrant in Germany who even got German citizenship.

Alexa Becker: Was that difficult for you, getting the citizenship?

Samet Durgun: It depends — even on the occupation you have. I work in the tech industry in Berlin, so as long as you pay taxes, you can apply for citizenship after some time. It had been more than eight years for me.

Alexa Becker: And were you introduced by a certain person? How did you get in touch?

Samet Durgun: There are several key people who were extremely generous with me, who were also thought leaders and opinion leaders in the community. The first is Prince Emrah, who also interviewed me for the book — a flipped interview, asking me the questions. Her pronouns are she and he. She was the first person I got in touch with. She is a belly dancer, a beauty and wellness student, a larger-than-life figure I am lucky to know and call my friend. The more time we spent together, the more people came along. She is also the founder of a collective [name unclear in the recording] that provides space for and champions queer refugee and asylum-seeker performance artists — singers, drag artists — who might have a hard time finding a stage when they first arrive. So it was an organic connection: me connecting with friends, connecting with the collective, and the whole community — community meaning people knowing each other, basically.

Alexa Becker: It sounds like a very organic development. I was really taken by the warmth of the portraits, but also by the more metaphorical images.

Berlin and visibility

Alexa Becker: This specific image is very touching — you see the shadows of the people in the spray of water, and I think it says a lot about visibility versus invisibility, and how these people are moving around in our society. Is it a little like that?

Samet Durgun: Everybody who looks at this picture takes what they take, and that is the beauty of images — I cannot force a meaning onto it. The only thing I can do is feel that this is the picture that fits the feeling, or the theme, in my mind. But this is a figurative image, so to say. There are more city images, in the book as well, because this book is about people — but also about people who live in a certain city. That is why it was important for me to observe the city, to collaborate with people in the city, and to make these images that are from the city.

Alexa Becker: An image pair that particularly speaks to me is this torso — warm and welcoming, with this amazing red colour, so soft — placed next to this building. That is what I associate with Berlin too: it is a big city, a tough city, not charming all the time, and the weather is not super nice most of the year. What is life there, from your perspective and from the refugees' perspective?

Samet Durgun: It is really interesting how we look at these two images and how many different meanings they can hold. For me, when I see them next to each other — which is how they appear in the book — I think that this person I know, Suryani, is like a rock. That is where this pairing came from: she is a rock to me. But it is fair to say everybody's life is different in Berlin. Some love it; all of us realize it is not the perfect city. But the comment I heard from people, many times, is that it is definitely better than where we came from — in terms of gender expression, feeling comfortable with your gender. Obviously it also has its own unique challenges.

Alexa Becker: Berlin has this very long tradition of being super open — you can be who you want to be there. There is a lot of openness and tolerance, or people simply do not care. It is certainly a very special city.

Samet Durgun: To build on that: somebody would not be openly harassed, let's say, walking in the street. But I would say the freedom of Berlin — the beauty of Berlin — comes from the fact that there are pockets of freedom that everybody can connect to. If you belong somewhere, or want to belong somewhere, you go and find those people. That diversity, what it can offer you, is the most important thing Berlin offers to LGBTQIA+ people. Not that it is really, really safe — not that everybody feels super safe in the streets or at night — but more that we know we are not alone. We are together, if we want to be.

Why this work

Alexa Becker: When you came to Berlin, was it clear to you that you would focus on the subject matter you did — on gender?

Samet Durgun: When you look at the book from a fair distance, yes, I can say gender is the main topic. But when I think about how these images came together, and why I made them, there is this part of me setting myself free from the shame that I had, from the secrets I had to keep. And there is the aspect of connecting with people — finding people whom I adore, I aspire to, I love. There is as much about connection in this book as there is about gender or displacement.

Background and influences

Alexa Becker: What I find interesting is that you had a life before photography. You started an entirely different career, and then you became a photographer — and successful really quickly. You have this book, an exhibition at the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin, which is not where you usually start. What brought you to photography?

Samet Durgun: That is a great question, and sometimes I try to answer it for myself. I think there is a part of me which always belonged to art. Taking pictures of my sister — consciously setting up stages, making my friends look good, taking pictures they liked. I was making paintings in high school while people had their lunch breaks; I was taking all the available art classes at my liberal university in Istanbul while I was enrolled in business. So art was always part of me, and I never really thought it could be something I would do professionally. It occurred to me after a couple of years of living the business life and still missing the depth — the emotions, the complexity, the freedom I was searching for. Photography and art were always with me; they just sprouted.

You mentioned this swift success — the book, thanks to talking with you, and the museum. I see these as the little leaves of a small sprout: there is so much rooting in the soil, and what we see is just the thing above the earth. It looks like everything started to happen very quickly, but that is just one part of the story.

Alexa Becker: Was there an artist, or different sources, that informed your aesthetic? You have a very consistent way of taking pictures.

Samet Durgun: I will try to keep this simple, because every time I talk about my inspirations I get lost. I feed my creativity from different art forms. The book's name, Come Get Your Honey, is a line from a song by Robyn, the singer and songwriter. There is André Aciman, the author of Call Me by Your Name, who has this positivity in him. There is Jeff Koons, there is Marina Abramović, there is Wolfgang Tillmans [?], there is Mitch Epstein — and countless beauty and fashion photographers, social portrait photographers. I am swimming in inspiration, taking the best of their bits. But visual consistency is something I am personally obsessed with — consistency in my life — and it surfaces in my images too.

Making the book

Alexa Becker: What was the bookmaking process like for you? It is entering something completely unknown — technical details, planning, paper choices.

Samet Durgun: I would say it is good that I did not know before I started. That does not mean I will not make more books — I love making books now. But as a beginner I totally underestimated how complex it is, how much effort and thought — and how many people — a book takes. I am glad we talked at the right time, maybe before I discovered how complex this thing is, so I jumped on it and grew into it. Thank you for making it sound easy, and for being so supportive from the beginning. It was a long and exciting process, and the team was extremely helpful and open to all my suggestions, even though I was doing this for the first time.

Alexa Becker: What does this book signify for you? It means different things to different people — a stepping stone in a career, or an object people fall in love with.

Samet Durgun: While I was making the images, I realized there was a deeper story I wanted to tell — a little universe I wanted to create. That required an intro and an outro: the intro from Amrou Al-Kadhi, the outro from Marianne Ager, a curator and a friend. Then the interview with Prince Emrah, who asks me the questions. And there are even QR codes where you can find sound and video — I will not tease too much — and a website where you can check the backside of some of the images. Many elements that together create a little universe. This book is as much a live object as it is an experience — for a viewer, for myself, and for the people in the pictures first.

Alexa Becker: To me a book is like a mini visit to a museum. It creates an atmosphere: you open it, you take your time, you have a little peace of mind, and you can digest its contents and let them sink in. You can pick it up, carry it, you do not need electricity. A book is really a miracle between two sheets of cardboard.

Samet Durgun: I absolutely agree. There is something I read: if you want to change someone's mind, give them a book. If you want to learn something at your own pace, a book is a great way to do it. And there is the feeling of coming back whenever you want — that does not happen with endless social media feeds, or even movies. You can keep coming back to your favourite image. There is so much more in it than two cardboards and some paper.

What comes next

Alexa Becker: Would you want to expand this body of work — a follow-up book — or is the topic done for you?

Samet Durgun: I am lucky to call some of the people in the book my friends, so we still see each other, and there are pictures coming from those meetings — I always take my camera with me. But this book is a personal book to me. It is even my coming out to my bigger family, who might not have seen the book yet. I am very connected to what I am doing in terms of images, and that is the thing I want to explore further: what is drawing my attention, what is making me think, what is making me dream. So I think there will not be a Come Get Your Honey Two — but there will, for sure, be images of people from the community, maybe Prince Emrah, that will surface in another way.

Photography as listening

Alexa Becker: It was said at the beginning that this was as much about listening as taking pictures. Can you explain that a little more?

Samet Durgun: The way I see it, today's photography — let's even put a number on it, 98 percent — is about the visuals. The visual accuracy, the metaphors and depth, the charge of an image. We are always looking at the surface; we consume it, looking at it but blindly, in a way. But there are other aspects beyond the what and the how, and I would call them the who and the why. Who is making the images — is there a connection between the photographer's ethnicity or culture and the subject? What is the socioeconomic status of the artist? We already ask those questions a lot. To me there is one more step, and that is why. With the given chances and opportunities, taking the time, being curious about this subject — why do I take these images? Whose gaze am I serving with them? Is there an additional interpretation of the subject I am dealing with, or am I just beautifying it — saying the same thing again, adding nothing? This "what if photography is listening" is about everything else but seeing.

Alexa Becker: Truly absorbing the background of why these pictures were taken and what they want to express. Thank you.

On collaboration

Moderator: Thank you for elaborating on that idea of photography as listening rather than seeing. With the portraits, how did you work with the people you were making work with — and about? Would you see it as a collaborative process? Some of the images are quite intimate and personal. To what extent did you discuss them with the people you worked with?

Samet Durgun: There was not one way of doing things — I would not say all pictures are collaborative, and I would not say all pictures are my ideas. It is a mix. But what is true is that everybody was well informed about what I was trying to do. One person who visited me after the book said: there was no way I would have said no to you, because you were so kind and direct with me about what you wanted to do — she told me she saw me as family. There was this really honest interaction between us. I did not go places to take pictures: I met people first and had relationships. That does not mean I was hiding my camera; it was more like waiting for a moment that drew both of our attentions.

There are also images that go a step further. The opening page of my website is a dance costume — a costume I borrowed from Prince Emrah, who interviewed me. It was such an organic moment that night: I wanted to dress up like Emrah and have a great picture of that. So there are also these over-collaborative images that hold an even deeper meaning for me, and I hope they transmit visually to the viewer as well.

Moderator: I think that relationship really comes through.

[Closing thanks — the moderator wraps up, notes the book is available through the Kehrer Verlag website, and the talk ends at 38:09.]

--- ### How Fifty People Became Fifteen Pictures URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/how-fifty-people-became-fifteen-pictures Date: 2026-08-31 Nearly fifty people are behind *Come Get Your Honey*. Around fifteen portraits carried the finished series. People sometimes ask what happened to the rest, and the honest answer is that the edit was the hardest part of the work, and the most ethical part of it too. ## When images choose each other Early in the editing I noticed something that sounds mystical but is really just pattern recognition running ahead of intention: the images felt like they were choosing each other. A portrait would demand a certain photograph of the city next to it. A quiet frame would make a loud one impossible. Viviane Sassen has a related idea that has stayed with me, that a single picture can shape the aesthetic of an entire body of work. Once a few images had locked together, they set the temperature for everything else, and photographs I liked on their own simply had no place in that weather. That is one reason fifty people became fifteen pictures. The other reason matters more. ## The pictures I held back Some of the people I photographed were not out to their families, or were out in one part of their life and not in another. A photograph can be a gift in one room and a danger in a different one. So there are images I held back on purpose — strong images, images I would happily hang on a wall — because the person in them was still keeping part of themselves from people who might one day see the book. The series mixes visibility and anonymity deliberately: some collaborators wanted to be fully seen, some wanted to be present without being identifiable, and both choices shaped the edit as much as any formal decision did. This is what consent looks like in practice. It is not a signature on a release form at the start. It is a series of decisions that continue long after the shutter, into the edit, into the book, into every exhibition since. ## Against parachutes There is a way of photographing communities that I think of as parachute work: arrive, extract the most dramatic frames, leave, publish. The pictures are often technically strong. The people in them rarely recognize themselves. The slow edit is the opposite of that. When you spend years with people, you accumulate too many photographs, and the surplus forces you to ask, for every single frame, what it is for and who it serves. Fifty people, fifteen pictures. The gap between those numbers is not waste. It is the work. *Come Get Your Honey* is published by Kehrer Verlag — the full series is here. --- ### Why the Book Has Audio and Video in It URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/why-the-book-has-audio-and-video Date: 2026-08-31 *Come Get Your Honey* holds two QR codes. One opens a voice recording, the other a video. People sometimes flag this as a gimmick before they scan, and change their mind after. The multimedia was not in the original plan for the book. It exists because of a single question. ## Marianne's question Marianne Ager, Curator for Photography and Film at Kunstmuseum Brandts, wrote the outro for the book. While we were working on it she asked me, almost in passing, whether I had video of the people in the photographs. I said no. The question stayed with me in the way unanswered questions do. Photography flattens people into a fraction of a second, and I had spent three years insisting that the work was about listening — yet the book, as planned, was silent. The people in it have voices, accents, laughter, ways of pausing. A portrait cannot carry any of that. A recording can. So the book grew two doors. Behind one, a voice. Behind the other, moving images. Neither replaces the photographs; they sit underneath them, the way a well in a courtyard does not replace the courtyard. ## A small universe From early on I wanted the book to be a self-contained world rather than a portfolio — an introduction, an outro, an interview by Prince Emrah, essays by Amrou Al-Kadhi and Marianne Ager, and the two QR codes. Something you enter, move through at your own pace, and leave changed by, rather than a sequence of my best frames. A printed book is portable and finite. Unlike a feed, it does not refresh, and it does not disappear. Adding audio and video could easily have broken that finiteness, turning the object into a landing page. The QR codes work because they are quiet: two small marks that wait until a reader is curious enough to ask the book a question. Which is, in the end, the same thing Marianne did to me. The book is published by Kehrer Verlag; the series it holds is here. --- ### Gaze and Skin — LANGER Space for Photography, Mannheim URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/gaze-and-skin-mannheim Date: 2026-08-31 In May 2026, *Come Get Your Honey* travelled to Mannheim for **Gaze and Skin**, a group exhibition at LANGER Space for Photography that opened on 13 May. The show brings three bodies of work into one room: Sarah Ungan's *Ayip!*, Ceren Saner's *Can'an*, and mine. Three practices circling related questions from different directions — what a gaze does to a body, what skin conceals and declares, and who gets to decide how a person is seen. I am glad about the company. All three works come out of long relationships rather than single encounters, and all three treat the people in the pictures as participants in the telling rather than as material for it. Hanging them together turns a shared method into something visible. Gaze and Skin is curated by Elisa Berdica, Arthur Bauer and Sarah Ungan, and supported by the Kulturamt der Stadt Mannheim. **Gaze and Skin** LANGER Space for Photography, Mannheim Opening 13 May 2026 Details on the exhibition page. The series itself is here. --- ### Come Get Your Honey at Fotografiska Berlin URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/fotografiska-emerging-berlin Date: 2026-08-31 From 16 July to 15 September 2025, *Come Get Your Honey* had its solo presentation at Fotografiska Berlin, as part of the Emerging Berlin programme — curated by Marie-Luise Mayer, with IFA Berlin, and produced with WhiteWall. Four years passed between the book and this show, which turned out to be the right distance. A book is a private encounter: one reader, one pace, one lap for it to rest on. An exhibition is public in a way that changes the work. People stood in front of the prints in groups, argued gently, came back to a frame a second time. Photographs that sit quietly on a page behaved differently at scale, and the city the pictures were made in was outside the museum door the whole time. Showing this work in Berlin mattered for a simpler reason too. Most of the people in the photographs live here. Some could visit their own portraits in a museum in the city that took them in — a sentence that would have sounded improbable when we started in 2018. My thanks to Marie-Luise Mayer and the Fotografiska team, to WhiteWall for the production, and above all to the people in the pictures, some of whom stood next to them at the opening. The exhibition record is here; the work travelled next to Gaze and Skin in Mannheim, which opened on 13 May 2026. --- ### Mind's War: Memories vs. Epoch URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/minds-war-memories-vs-epoch Date: 2023-07-03 Let's talk about memory - yours, mine, and what the media tells us it should be. In our rapidly evolving society: "What constitutes a memory, and who shapes it?" As far as I am concerned, this inquiry ponders the pervasive influence of Western culture and the omnipresent media, from TikTok creators to media outlets, on my memory formation. Renowned artists like Andy Warhol from New York have been immortalized in our cultural memory, but why do we bestow such a privilege? This recalls the ubiquity of Western influence in our consciousness, extending from our daily lives to the larger cultural landscape. Regardless of its size, the media persistently vies for our attention, seeking to shape our perception and, in turn, our memories. When did presidential news, Sesame Street jingle, Black Friday Sales, Met Gala costumes, Hollywood or Christmas, start representing collective memory, a ‘defaultness,’ and take space in our dialogues, and compete with our recollections, our conversations? These shared experiences have become epochs, diminishing the significance of our small, personal memories. Yet, aren't these overlooked, everyday moments shaping our true selves? The challenge lies in recognizing the beauty in our every day and accepting that each memory, regardless of its scale, holds its unique value. And it is valid to keep the slightest memory and maybe not be on top of every trend. We must reassess how we value and share our memories, shifting our gaze from the spotlight of public consciousness to the intimate corners of personal experiences. Attention is 💎 and we have a limited capacity. --- ### Photography's Quiet Revolution: Seeing Through Listening URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/photographys-quiet-revolution-seeing-through-listening Date: 2023-07-02 We risk missing the quieter, subtler narratives in our haste to create something visually stunning. If you're intrigued by this philosophy (and promise not to rush through it), I invite you to look closely at the series. I hope you'll find a series of images conveying this spirit of "more listening, less seeing." Photography is often lauded as a visual language. However, the emphasis on creating impactful, aesthetically pleasing, and message-laden images can sometimes overshadow the inherent value of quieter moments that don't instantly seek attention. The pursuit of the 'perfect' shot, framing, or expression might inadvertently limit the scope of our storytelling. We're continually encouraged to ‘make our photos speak,’ but the question arises: Are we also willing to listen? Are we listening to the narratives, the subtle nuances, the understated emotions that a scene, a subject, or a moment might be trying to communicate? Whose gaze are we serving? As photographers, we could let go of our urge of ‘seeing’ and bring in ‘listening.’ Like in a conversation, listening in photography involves an in-depth understanding of our surroundings, people in front of the camera, and, most importantly, our biases and preconceptions. It's about being open to all aspects of a visual moment. To illustrate, consider the often monotonous tone of the Google news alerts I receive concerning ‘LGBTQIA+ refugees.’ The stories are invariably dark (and valid), intended to get my attention as if they represent the only reality. But as a photographer, I'm challenged to delve deeper, to listen for the subtler narratives beneath the sensational headlines. A photo that doesn't conform to traditionally celebrated aesthetics or doesn't instantly reveal a clear message might be disregarded in a world that's often in a hurry. Yet, it might also be the one that tells the most profound story to those willing to ‘listen.’ When was the last time your camera heard a story? --- ### Soft Activism: The Art of Quiet Transformation URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/soft-activism-the-art-of-quiet-transformation Date: 2023-07-01 Traditionally, an activist is characterized as someone who advocates for political or social change through organized efforts. However, I find myself diverging from this label. As a soft activist, I seek to instill change subtly, inviting others to consider new perspectives and weaving narratives that work their magic behind the scenes. Soft activism doesn't have a clear definition online that I hope for, so I'll define it here (big responsibility): A subtle form of advocacy that gradually influences hearts and minds without causing shock, emergency, or disturbance. This approach may be less ‘visible’, yet its deep roots can bring about lasting transformation over time. As a photographer, particularly one focused on portraying people, there is often an implicit expectation to advocate for specific causes through images. Renowned photographers such as Zanele Muholi, Nan Goldin, and Wolfgang Tillmans have been celebrated for their proactive involvement in causes, capturing different communities through their lens. I love and celebrate their work. The media often molds our expectations of what photographers should do and what topics they should consider relevant. There's a tendency to expect photographers to depict well-defined communities from an 'optimal' distance - close enough to evoke empathy, yet not so close as to feel politically confronting. Otherwise, your art is suddenly political and goes into another category. Martha Rosler asserts in one of her interviews, “The ‘non-artist’ art world prefers art that doesn’t direct their attention to the now … They prefer to see it as something that helps them move away from concerns of the everyday … Art has an obligation to speak to people about the conditions of everyday life, not necessarily to make them feel insuperable, quite the opposite, to remind them that they are engaged citizens.” In my photo book Come Get Your Honey, I navigate various aspects of identity within Berlin's queer refugee folks. I create space for individuals to engage with my art at their own pace without aggressively promoting an agenda or rallying crowds for immediate change. My work invites introspection, the discovery of shared human experiences, and, ultimately, the quiet transformation of perspectives. As the curator Marianne Ager puts it: “Soft activism insists, though quietly, on continuing the conversation. It is strong-willed but tolerant. It builds bridges instead of digging trenches.” --- ### 2020s Photography in 6 Principles URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/2020s-photography-in-6-principles Date: 2023-06-30 Dare to pause. Dare to look closer. Dare to understand the essence of photography. What if we are entering an era where we have time to examine what's in front of us? Let's talk about 2020s photography, but forget for a moment the generative artificial intelligence, machine learning, lens-free cameras, 3D images by Apple Vision Pro, Midjourney, augmented and virtual realities, NFTs, and social media platforms that seem to be commanding much of our attention (or should I say, doom scroll). I'd rather delve into the essence of capturing a moment, an emotion, or a thought within the confines of a frame. To me, there are 6 elements, and we tend to oversee the last one. 1 - Visual fidelity is the first principle we encounter. We expect an image to look exceptional, even intentionally blurry. As we are submerged in an ocean of images - billions of cameras, trillions of photos - the drive for good visual quality has become a given. 2 - Then, we have tension - a feeling, a pulse, an idea that grips us and refuses to let go. A unique facial expression, a landscape painted with gorgeous colors, a crafty installation thought out to the last detail, or a collage weaving unexpected materials together. These elements ‘charge’ an image, making it magnetically hold our attention. 3 - If it is a series of images, the artist ensures there's a million-dollar shot. In the best case (with additional curatorial power), the remaining photos layer meaning but do not necessarily add more visual quality. Nobel-winner Annie Ernaux opens her book, The Years, with “All the images will disappear.” And if you are lucky, that’s that one picture we will remember from an artwork, if not from the artist’s whole career (no pressure here). Photography is funny. It is a sequential art mostly, either done by us, editors or curators, but then what we all remember is that one picture. 4 - Delving deeper, we encounter metaphor and depth. An image that speaks a language we understand, but doesn’t disclose all its secrets at first glance, pulls us into a closer inspection, a dialogue. Think about all the pictures showing someone’s back, instead of their face. Are we done? Not yet. These four principles, I believe, cover 98% of the photographic artwork you see today (making some educated estimations here). But what about the remaining 2%? What about the factors that make us look not just at the art but at the artist? 5 - The question, “Who is behind the images?” propels us toward the next principle. It could make us pause and consider: Are there enough voices represented? Is the artist's identity intertwined with their subject matter - gender, location, age, sex, ability, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status? Is the diversity in front of the camera or behind? 6 - The final principle is obvious, yet it's often overlooked. People feel it immediately, and we might call it ‘authenticity.’ It's the question of “Why?” - the driving force behind my monograph Come Get Your Honey. Why do I choose to tell this particular story? Whose gaze do I want to serve? Do I expand the interpretations of its ‘subject’? Considering these questions, photography could reach new depths and unseen levels of quality. I encourage us, then, not to look further but deeper. The future of photography isn't just in front of the camera - it's also behind it. An earlier, five-principle version of this essay was written in 2021 for HALLE4, Deichtorhallen Hamburg's #photography2050 series; it is in the press archive. --- ### Resonations: A New Lens in Artistic Connection URL: https://sametdurgun.com/journal/resonations-a-new-lens-in-artistic-connection Date: 2023-06-29 In art, we often use the term 'inspiration.' But we might have lost its true essence. The words we use to articulate our relationship with art tend to put blinders on our perception. Take the word 'inspiration,' the divine influence. It's so commonly used, so casually thrown around, that we may have lost the essence of it. As the definition suggests, inspiration is “the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.” I'd like to offer another word when we talk about our work: Resonation. When I resonate with another artist's work, I feel a profound connection, like we speak the same artistic language on the same wavelength. This goes beyond mere inspiration - it's about finding threads of shared thoughts, shared beliefs, and shared vision. When we describe others' work, we tend to look to renowned artists, current or from bygone eras, and label them as sources of inspiration. Or when the artist claims their inspiration from known artists, we feel relief as it is easy to make obvious connections. But in doing so, are we not overlooking the contributions of less heralded artists? Isn't there a risk of negating the immense, collective influence of known, unknown, and forgotten artists that have shaped our artistic sensibilities over the ages? Should the winners take all? Thinking about resonation rather than inspiration seems a fairer tribute to the universe of artistic thought we all draw from. It allows us to acknowledge a grand tapestry of influences without belittling anyone's contributions and limiting our understanding to linear, one-to-one connections. I think about my photography series, Come Get Your Honey. In an essay in the book, my dear friend, curator Marianne Ager compared my work to the works of Nan Goldin and Christer Strömholm, whose photos also document important narratives of LGBTQIA+ communities. While the readers can say I could be 'inspired' by them (benchmarking my work to theirs), I suggest that my work 'resonates' with theirs - not an apparent influence, but a shared commitment and creative drive. In fact, my resonations go beyond photography: Painters, musicians, novelists, psychologists, philosophers, and my queer belly dancer friends. Let's consider music, a different art form, to add another dimension to this discourse. My most profound resonations often come from this realm. Music uniquely mirrors and amplifies my current mood, and I can keep listening to the pieces that strike the right chords within me. If you've seen my book Come Get Your Honey, you might have noticed a rhythmic undercurrent, a melody underlying the narrative (Hint: try googling ‘Robyn Honey’). I want to clarify that I'm not suggesting a song that inspired the book in a conventional sense. Rather, its emotional resonance echoed my feelings during the editing process, contributing to the overall tone and mood of the work. Art isn't born out of a vacuum - it's a continuous dialogue spanning generations, cultures, and individuals. We all contribute to this dialogue, borrowing, reinterpreting, also forgetting, or simply creating our own new ideas. So, the next time you find yourself marveling at a piece of art, ask yourself: does it inspire or resonate with you?