Emerging Queer Photographers Worldwide

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	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

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 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.

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

Working against a backdrop of religious conservatism, he treats the body as abstract sculpture — contorted limbs, surrealist choreography, gender markers stripped away.

Ugo Woatzi Belgium

Masks, fabric and shadow as metaphors for the performance of hiding in heteronormative spaces.

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

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.

Africa and diaspora

Alexandra Obochi Abuja

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.

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 France / Senegal / South Africa

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.

DeLovie Kwagala Kampala / Berlin

Belongs in this company too; more on the Berlin-based work here.

East Asia and diaspora

Guanyu Xu Beijing / Chicago

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.

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

Photography as a vehicle for tenderness and imagined futures rather than evidence, joining documentary image-making to a somatic practice.

Meng-Yu Yan Sydney

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.

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

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.

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, family archive and installation around Puerto Rican lineage and queer identity.

North America

Laila Annmarie Stevens New York, b. 2001

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.

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. Photographers working the same ground in Germany specifically are here.