Samet DurgunPhotographer
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Photobooks on Queer Refugees, Asylum and Migration

Journal · Field guide

A field guide to the photobooks on queer refugees, asylum and forced migration — the small core shelf, the wider shelf around it, and where Come Get Your Honey sits on both.

The other guides map people. This one maps books, because a photobook is a different kind of object from a project: it has a publisher, a date, an ISBN, a place on a library shelf, and it stays as it was printed. When someone asks me what else exists in book form on queer refugees and asylum, this is the shelf I can point to. It is short. I went looking for it expecting it to be longer.

The rule for inclusion is simple: a published book, with a publisher and an ISBN or a library record I could open. Exhibitions, projects, magazines and e-books are named at the end where they matter, but they aren’t entries. As with the other guides, nothing here is a ranking, and a claim about who someone is only appears where a publisher, a library or the person themselves has put it in writing.

At a glance

Book Photographer Publisher The move
Come Get Your Honey Samet Durgun Kehrer Verlag, 2021 Queer refugee life in Berlin, from friendship, with a voice and a video inside the book
There Are No Homosexuals in Iran Laurence Rasti Edition Patrick Frey, 2017 Gay Iranians waiting in a Turkish transit town; faces covered and uncovered by turns
This Is How the Heart Beats: LGBTQ East Africa Jake Naughton The New Press, 2020 The same LGBTQ Ugandans followed from hiding in Kenya to resettlement
Limitless Africans Mikael Owunna FotoEvidence, 2019 Portraits and interviews with LGBTQ African immigrants and refugees across ten countries
Asylum Alexander Kargaltsev Studio van Stralen, 2013 Gay Russian asylum seekers in New York, photographed by one of their own
Where Love Is Illegal Robin Hammond Editions Bessard, 2022 Polaroid portraits and handwritten testimony from fourteen countries; adjacent, not an asylum book
Ville de Calais Henk Wildschut Self-published, 2017 The camp as architecture, every picture dated, no faces
Dzhangal Gideon Mendel GOST Books, 2017 Objects from the Calais mud instead of the people who refused the camera
The Citizen Tobias Zielony Spector Books, 2017 Refugee activists in Germany, published back in African newspapers
Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016 Daniel Castro Garcia John Radcliffe Studio, 2016 Slow medium-format portraits against the speed of the news
Incoming Richard Mosse MACK, 2017 A weapons-grade thermal camera turned on the routes
Migration as Avant-Garde Michael Danner Verlag Kettler, 2018 Own pictures, archive and Hannah Arendt on one page
A Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia Alixandra Fazzina Trolley Books, 2010 Two years on the route from the Horn of Africa across the Gulf of Aden
Crossing: From USA to Canada, Walking Roxham Road Ruth Kaplan Kehrer Verlag, 2026 Everything around one irregular border crossing, not the crossing
The Return Salih Basheer Self-published, 2026 A Sudanese photographer’s own flight, folded into other families’
Sunil Gupta: From Here to Eternity Sunil Gupta Autograph, 2020 Forty years of gay life across four cities, sequenced through the artist’s own archive
narrow distances Ka-Man Tse Candor Arts, 2018 Queer Asian diaspora between Hong Kong and New York, on a view camera

Queer refugees and asylum

Five books, and one beside them. That is the whole core shelf I could verify, across Europe, North America, East Africa and Turkey, and it is worth saying plainly that this is how small the field is in book form.

Come Get Your Honey Samet Durgun, 2021
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg. Half-cloth hardcover, 144 pages, 75 colour plates, and two QR codes that open a voice recording and a video; texts by Marianne Ager, Amrou Al-Kadhi, Prince Emrah and me. The publisher's page describes the people in it as LGBTQIA+ refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin and the method as bonds made at eye level, through friendship. It is the only book on this shelf made in Germany. [Why the book has audio and video in it](/journal/why-the-book-has-audio-and-video) and [how the edit was made](/journal/how-fifty-people-became-fifteen-pictures) are written up separately.
There Are No Homosexuals in Iran Laurence Rasti, 2017
Edition Patrick Frey No. 238; a second edition followed in 2018. Made in Denizli, the Turkish town where gay Iranian refugees wait for a host country, the book alternates covered and uncovered faces so that a person is present without being identifiable. Rasti has described each portrait as a collaboration with the sitter. Dazed calls her a Swiss-born Iranian photographer; nothing I could find says more about her own position than that. In subject it is the closest published neighbour to Bradley Secker's decade of work in Turkey, which has never appeared as a printed book.
This Is How the Heart Beats: LGBTQ East Africa Jake Naughton, 2020
The New Press, New York, in its Diverse Humanity series of LGBTQ+ photobooks, with an introduction by the journalist Jacob Kushner and a foreword by the Ugandan activist Ruth Muganzi. It follows the same people over years: out of Uganda after the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, into hiding in Kenya, and on to resettlement in the United States or back. The publisher calls it a record of LGBTQ forced migration, and it is the one book I found that treats Kenya as a country of first asylum for queer people, even if only as transit.
Limitless Africans Mikael Owunna, 2019
FotoEvidence, New York; 250 pages, 75 colour photographs, texts by Zun Lee and Rafeeat Aliyu, and a finalist for the FotoEvidence Book Award with World Press Photo that year. Four years of portraits and interviews with thirty LGBTQ African immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers in ten countries across North America, the Caribbean and Europe. Owunna writes on the publisher's page as gay and Nigerian, and about being an immigrant; it is a book made from inside the diaspora it describes, which is why it also belongs in the last section below.
Asylum Alexander Kargaltsev, 2013
Studio van Stralen, Groningen, in English and Dutch; a first edition appeared in the United States in 2012. Kargaltsev was granted asylum there in 2011 on grounds of persecution for his sexual orientation, and the book is nude portraits of other gay and bisexual Russian men who sought the same, each against a New York backdrop, each with his written story. The nakedness stands for arriving with nothing. It is the earliest book on this shelf and the only one I found made by a queer refugee about other queer refugees; I could not locate a publisher's page, so the Dutch library record stands in.
Where Love Is Illegal Robin Hammond, 2022
Editions Bessard, Paris. Eighty large-format Polaroid portraits of LGBTQI+ people from fourteen countries, made between 2014 and 2019 with the people photographed choosing pose, dress and whether to cover their face, and writing their own testimony by hand. I have put it on this shelf as a neighbour rather than a member: neither the publisher nor the project itself uses the word refugee. Its subject is life where queer love is criminalised, and some of the people in it have been displaced by that, but it is not a book about asylum and I don't want to describe it as one.

The wider shelf

The books on refugees and forced migration that the core shelf sits inside. This is the canon as I’ve come to read it, not a survey; each of these does one thing the classic refugee photograph doesn’t.

Ville de Calais Henk Wildschut, 2017
Self-published, Amsterdam; 320 pages in the English edition, designed by Robin Uleman with every photograph dated and sequenced in order. The rise and demolition of the Calais camp told through what people built there, not their faces. Prix du Livre at Arles in 2017 and the Dutch Photobook Prize in 2019. The middle book of a trilogy with Shelter and Rooted.
Dzhangal Gideon Mendel, 2017
GOST Books, London; 80 pages, 47 colour plates, with writing by residents of the camp and texts by Paul Mason and Dominique Malaquais. Residents did not want to be photographed, for fear a picture could damage an asylum claim, so Mendel photographed what they had lost in the mud and ash instead. The title is Pashto for "this is the forest", the phrase the Jungle was named from.
The Citizen Tobias Zielony, 2017
Spector Books, Leipzig; 288 pages, German and English, first shown in the German Pavilion at Venice in 2015. Twenty-four photographs of refugee activists from Sudan and other African countries in Berlin and Hamburg, and 252 reproduced pages from the African newspapers and magazines that ran those pictures with texts by African writers. The book is the record of the images travelling back the way the people came. Spector's own page would not open for me; the bookseller record links here instead.
Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016 Daniel Castro Garcia, 2016
John Radcliffe Studio, distributed by MACK; 240 pages, 167 colour plates, made with the designer Thomas Saxby in three sections by route: North Africa to Italy, the Middle East through Greece and the Balkans, and Calais. Medium-format portraits made face to face, with time, as a deliberate answer to the speed and alarm of the news coverage that year. Shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture First Book Award.
Incoming Richard Mosse, 2017
MACK, London; 576 pages, 280 metallic tritone plates, texts by Mosse and Giorgio Agamben. Stills from the film Mosse made with Ben Frost and Trevor Tweeten on a military thermal camera that reads a body's heat from thirty kilometres and registers no identity at all. The apparatus of the border, turned round to look at the border.
Migration as Avant-Garde Michael Danner, 2018
Verlag Kettler, Dortmund; 120 pages, now sold out, Kassel Dummy Award 2018. Danner's own photographs from Europe's borders between 2008 and 2017, layered with historic archive images and quotations, built on Hannah Arendt's 1943 essay We Refugees and its claim that the refugee is the vanguard of their people. First shown at C/O Berlin.
A Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia Alixandra Fazzina, 2010
Trolley Books, London; 368 pages, 350 photographs, with an Arabic edition the following year. Two years following tahrib, the route from the Horn of Africa to the coast and across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, at a price of about fifty dollars a head. The strongest book I know from before 2015, and the only one on this shelf on an African–Arabian route.
Crossing: From USA to Canada, Walking Roxham Road Ruth Kaplan, 2026
Kehrer Verlag; 176 pages, 128 colour photographs, with texts by Sarah Bassnett, Raoul Boulakia and Habib Zahori. Roxham Road was an irregular crossing into Quebec used by asylum seekers from 2018 until it was closed in 2023, and Kaplan made about a dozen trips there over five years to photograph everything around the crossing rather than the crossing itself: cab drivers, waiting rooms, a bus station, belongings left behind. The most recent Kehrer book on asylum, and a neighbour of mine on the same publisher's list.
The Return Salih Basheer, 2026
Self-published; 121 pages, 49 photographs with diary entries, testimonies and drawings by displaced Sudanese, and an essay by Joshua Craze. Basheer left Khartoum suddenly in April 2023, and the book folds his own displacement into the stories of other families from the war. It is new and self-published, so there is no library record yet; the Magnum store carries the same edition.

After arrival: queer, migrant, not refugee

Two books on queer diaspora life whose makers are migrants by their own account and not refugees. I’ve kept them separate so the distinction the rest of this site insists on holds here too.

Sunil Gupta: From Here to Eternity Sunil Gupta, 2020
Autograph, London, edited by Mark Sealy for the retrospective at The Photographers' Gallery; 196 pages. Four decades of work between New Delhi, Montreal, New York and London, sequenced through Gupta's own snapshots, postcards, letters and clippings, and opening on the question of what it means to be a gay Indian man. Gupta arrived in Montreal with his family in 1969, at sixteen. A retrospective rather than a project book, which is why it rather than Exiles or Lovers is here: it is the one that holds the migration and the queer life in a single sequence.
narrow distances Ka-Man Tse, 2018
Candor Arts, Illinois, in a first edition of 400; 84 photographs made between 2004 and 2018 in Hong Kong and New York on a 4×5 view camera, through conversations about home and placelessness, with essays and poems in English and Chinese and an interview by Elle Pérez. Tse was born in Kowloon and emigrated to the United States as an infant, and describes herself as queer. Candor Arts closed in 2021, so the book is out of print; the publisher's page is still up.

Not on the shelf, and why

Several of the projects that matter most to this subject have never become books, and it seems more honest to say so than to leave them out silently. Bradley Secker’s decade with gay men from Syria, Iran and Iraq in Turkey exists only as a Kindle e-book. Omar Imam’s Live, Love, Refugee and César Dezfuli’s Passengers are exhibitions and editions, not books. Francesco Giordano’s Rainbow Refugees (Stories), twenty-seven portraits with first-person accounts from Munich in 2019, is the closest German neighbour to my own work in subject, and it was published as a magazine without an ISBN. A 2017 LesMigraS brochure of ten portraits of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans refugees in Germany was a counselling service’s publication, not a photobook. Every one of these belongs in the photographers’ guides, where they are.

Where mine sits

On the core shelf Come Get Your Honey is the only book made in Germany, and, as far as I could find, the only book with an ISBN on queer refugee life in this country at all. I’d rather that were not true. On the wider shelf it sits with the books that begin after arrival, Wildschut’s and Kaplan’s, and with Kargaltsev’s and Owunna’s in being made from a relationship to the people in it rather than from an assignment; I am not a refugee, and my book doesn’t claim to be made from inside that condition. The two things it does that none of the others do are the voice recording and the video, and the reason for those is written up separately.

The photobook Come Get Your Honey is published by Kehrer Verlag, and the full series is online. The people behind these books are mapped in the guide to photographers working on refugees, forced migration and asylum, and the Germany-specific field in photographers of queer refugee life in Germany. All nine field guides sit together on one page.

Sources

Where the claims above come from: a publisher's or library's record for every book, and the press or institution behind any claim about a maker. Each link is named by the page it opens. Checked 22 September 2026.

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