# 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-come-get-your-honey-978-3-96900-031-1
## 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-come-get-your-honey-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
## 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
## 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)
- 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
- [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
## 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/art-and-culture/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)
## Prints
Two signed artist editions of the book (edition of 30 each, with a numbered archival pigment print), available by enquiry: hi@sametdurgun.com. https://sametdurgun.com/prints
## Press & curators
Biography (short and long), CV, works list, and mandatory photo credits for reuse: https://sametdurgun.com/press/kit
## 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
### 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 photographers have been working near the same questions for years — some in Germany, some elsewhere, some from the other end of the same routes, some on queerness with no migration in the picture at all. I've written it up as four separate maps rather than one long list, because the four questions are genuinely different ones, and because "Samet Durgun and twelve others" is a worse way to read any of this than just reading about the twelve.
None of it is a ranking, and I've tried to hold a real bar for it: a photographer's identity or a factual claim about their work only appears here where I could actually stand behind it, not where a first pass of research happened to turn it up. Most of these people I've never met.
**Photographers working on refugees, forced migration and asylum →**
The widest frame — from photographers who begin after the boat and the border rather than at them, to work that hands the camera to the people it's about, to work that turns the apparatus of looking into the subject itself. Where *Come Get Your Honey* sits inside a tradition much bigger than Berlin.
**Queer refugee photographers in Germany →**
Narrow it to Germany specifically, and the field gets small fast. The photographers working, right now, at the actual intersection of queerness, asylum and daily life here — some through relationship and biography, some grown out of counselling and advocacy work, some as long-form documentary from outside.
**Queer photographers from and based in Germany →**
Step back from migration entirely: the much larger lineage of German and Germany-based photographers who've spent decades figuring out how to photograph queer life at all, from Wolfgang Tillmans and Sven Marquardt through to the generation working now. This is the lineage my own work sits inside as much as the one about refugees.
**Emerging queer photographers worldwide →**
Past Germany altogether — a generation of queer photographers early in their careers, working across six continents on migration, family, faith, land and the body. I'm one entry in this field, not a special case inside it.
The series itself is here. The plainer account of what *Come Get Your Honey* is and who it involved is here.
---
### 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 | Repeated Best of PhotoVogue |
| 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 | The body as sculpture | *New Queer Photography* |
| Ugo Woatzi | Belgium | *Chameleon* | LensCulture |
| 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 | Queer Nigerian world-building | PhotoVogue |
| Eric Gyamfi | Accra | *Just Like Us* | Foam Paul Huf Award |
| Elijah Ndoumbe | France / Senegal / South Africa | Photography, film, sound, food | Smithsonian acquisition |
| 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 | Aperture; Jimei Arles |
| Meng-Yu Yan | Sydney | Mirrors, cuts, video | National Photographic Portrait Prize finalist |
| 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 | Self-portraiture and archive | Giard finalist 2024; three residencies |
| Laila Annmarie Stevens | New York | *Clayton Sisterhood Project* | Aperture shortlist 2024; PhotoVogue 2025 |
| 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
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.
Moves across documentary, fashion and fine art with an unusually deep and repeatedly recognised PhotoVogue portfolio. The open question is less the eye, which is clearly there, than whether the volume of it consolidates into one or two major bodies of work.
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.
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.
Working against a backdrop of religious conservatism, he treats the body as abstract sculpture — contorted limbs, surrealist choreography, gender markers stripped away.
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.
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.
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.
The genuine wild card: his filmmaking is moving faster right now than his photography, and a queer Central Asian visual voice at all is rare enough that whatever he builds next is worth watching.
Queer Nigerian experience, femininity and Igbo culture through a fashion-inflected lens — building a queer world rooted in Nigeria's own difficult social and legal environment rather than importing one.
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.
Probably the most artistically ambitious name on this list: photography sits alongside film, sound, installation and food, and the work has recently entered the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art — a serious institutional signal this early in a career.
Temporarily Censored Home covered his conservative parents' Beijing apartment, while they were out, with hundreds of prints — self-portraits, images of gay men made in the US, family archive, Western fashion editorials — photographed the intervention, then dismantled it without a trace. Resident Aliens extends the same method into the homes of US visa holders.
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.
Chinese-Australian, combining photography with cutting, mirrors, sculpture and video into surreal images about race, gender and alienation — a visual language distinctive enough to travel beyond queer-themed shows.
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.
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.
May already be close to outgrowing "emerging": 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.
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.
One of the clearest breakouts on this list: the Clayton Sisterhood Project links Black family history, reverse migration and chosen family without reducing queerness to sexuality.
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.
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. Photographers working the same ground in Germany specifically 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 | PhotoVogue | 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 narrower field — queer refugee photographers specifically — is 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
My Heart Is on Fire is an older project that deserves more attention than it's had — long individual narratives with LGBTQI asylum seekers, built from photography, testimony and documents together, in a mode that anticipated the multimedia approach a lot of socially engaged photography uses now.
## 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 all three directions keep running into: photographs and photobooks from this field are increasingly being used as supporting evidence in asylum credibility assessments — a use nobody making the work originally set out to serve, and a new job for the medium.
The series 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.
## 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. What sets it apart inside the group is that its subject is specifically 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I sit partly here too, through my own biography rather than through method. I'm a first-generation immigrant, and queer, and the people in my book are friends; the relationship came before every photograph. But I held the camera. I don't want to claim a redistribution of authorship I didn't actually make.
## Queer forced migration
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the camera, and I don't think that's the same thing as handing the camera over.
The series 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.
---
### 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.
---
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. Every chapter below is open by default and its timestamp seeks the player above — nothing is hidden behind a click, so folding a chapter you've read is a convenience, not a requirement for reading the rest.
[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.
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### 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.
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### 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 next station for the work is Gaze and Skin in Mannheim, opening May 2026.