Listening in Practice: How I Make Photographs With People

The first time Prince Emrah and I met for coffee, she looked at me and said, “it is hard for me to build trust with a photographer. But let’s give it a try.” That is in the interview she did with me for the book, and nobody has given me a better opening line since.

The book began with a question: what if photography is more about listening than seeing? People like the question, which is nice, and then they ask what it looks like with a camera in the room. This is my answer for Come Get Your Honey, in the order things happened.

The short version: I met people before I photographed them. I told them what I was doing, and sometimes asked them to say if they did not want to be in a picture. Before there was a book we looked at the pictures together and took things out. The sequence and the pairings are mine. I hold back pictures that could expose someone, and a new context is a new question.

Tina Campt wrote Listening to Images about photographs that already exist. I mean something plainer: what I do with living people, in the room, before and while a picture gets made.

I met people first

I did not go places to take pictures. I met people first and had relationships. Emrah took me backstage, and then to a lot of other backstages. I had been photographing queer people for a while when, on May Day 2019, a few hours before her gig in Kreuzberg, she introduced me to friends she used to share a dorm with, queer and trans refugees and asylum seekers. I was mesmerised by each of them and by what they told me that day.

That was the day I decided to pursue the idea. It was not yet a project, let alone a book. Kylie Divon, who is on the cover, did not know a book was coming, and neither did I. She remembers we met backstage at Silver Future, in what was basically a beverage storage. I don’t remember. She did the talking, and I was, in her words, “there, listening.”

How I ask for consent

People knew what I was doing, because I told them. I was almost pathologically direct about consent, especially with anyone I sensed was as much of a people-pleaser as I am, someone who would find it hard to say no. With them I would sometimes ask: could you please tell me if you don’t want to be in this picture?

Some said they did not want to be in the book. Some let me know without saying it. Some asked for a pseudonym, which is why there are pseudonyms in the book. Some did not want their faces shown.

None of that meant hiding the camera. I always took it with me. It was more like waiting for a moment that drew both of our attention. Kylie tells this one better than I do: during the lockdown she would write, “Samet, I’m going through it,” and I would come over. We would talk. Then the camera would come out, and we would walk to a park and make a picture.

Consent goes well beyond a signature at the start. It is a series of decisions that continue long after the shutter, into the edit, into the book and into every exhibition since. I wrote about the edit separately.

Who chooses the pictures

Not every picture is collaborative, and not every picture was my idea. It is a mix, and some of the pictures go a step further and are over-collaborative. The costume in my self-portrait is Emrah’s. I wanted to dress up like her, and I felt completely comfortable in it, not least because it made my legs look better.

Before there was a book, we all looked at the pictures as a community and loved them. We chose them together, somehow, and we took things out. The sequence and the pairings are mine. They are my impressions of the stories people told me, which makes the book a subjective representation, and I say so.

The pictures I hold back

A photograph can be a gift in one room and a danger in a different one. 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. There are strong pictures I would happily hang on a wall that I will not publish, because the people in them were still keeping part of their lives from people who might one day see the book.

That is one reason nearly fifty people became fifteen in the pictures. The other is the edit: the images felt like they were choosing each other.

When a picture moves

Berlin has pockets of freedom, and streets where that freedom does not reach. A picture can leave the place it was made. On a collective’s page it reaches one audience. Kylie’s portrait at Fotografiska Berlin was bigger than life. The book is on shelves at Stanford, Harvard and the Getty Research Institute. A new context is a new question, and a selection follows the consent of the people in the pictures before it follows the wall. The exhibition page says how I handle that.

Then the book

I wanted a small universe, not a portfolio. The book has an introduction, an outro, an interview in which Emrah asks me the questions, and QR codes that open a voice recording and a video. The recording is a message Kylie sent me about herself: “Oh, your friend is a star.” I put it in because a portrait cannot carry a voice. The people in the book got the book.

Where I sit

I am not a refugee and I am not an asylum seeker. I am German-Turkish-Abkhazian. My great-grandparents left the Caucasus for the Ottoman Empire as refugees, generations before any of this. I came to Berlin in 2013 as a first-generation immigrant, and after more than eight years I became a German citizen. I describe myself as a social exile. I am partly part of the community: we are queer, and we live somewhere other than where we come from. My situation is not theirs.

Looking back, my own identity shaped the series too. I thought I was observing, but I was in it.

These days I am learning to say no to myself, as a people-pleaser. I try to listen to myself: do I want to be here, do we want to meet, do I want to take a picture now?

The facts, once

Come Get Your Honey is a series I started in 2018 and still add to, because the friendships are still going. The book, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2021 (ISBN 978-3-96900-031-1), is finished. Nearly fifty people took part and fifteen people are in the book. It holds 75 illustrations, which include photographs of the city, so people and pictures are counted separately.

I talked this idea through with Alexa Becker of Kehrer Verlag at the Photobook Fair at Impressions Gallery in Bradford in October 2021, and the recording and transcript are here. I talked it through again with Kylie Divon and the curator Marie-Luise Mayer at the opening of Fotografiska Berlin in July 2025. Both talks were in English. I give talks at museums, universities and festivals in English, German or Turkish, and the list of talks has the formats. The audio and video have their own page, the full series is online, and the photographers who stayed with people after arrival, for years, are in a field guide.