Samet DurgunPhotographer
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Emerging Queer Photographers Worldwide

Journal · Field guide

Queer photographers early in their careers, working across six continents on migration, family, faith, land and the body — a field Come Get Your Honey belongs to, one entry among many.

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.

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