Photographers Working on Refugees, Forced Migration and Asylum

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.

César Dezfuli Spain

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.

Tobias Zielony Germany

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.

Henk Wildschut Netherlands

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.

Muhammed Muheisen Jordan / Netherlands

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.

Giles Duley UK

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.

Sahat Zia Hero Kutupalong, Bangladesh

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.

Robin Hammond New Zealand

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.

Barat Ali Batoor Afghanistan / Australia

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.

Omar Imam Syria / Netherlands

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

Bradley Secker Istanbul

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.

Richard Mosse Ireland

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.

Gideon Mendel South Africa / UK

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.

Dario Mitidieri Italy / UK

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.

Giorgos Moutafis Greece

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.

Alessandro Penso Italy

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.

Sergey Ponomarev Russia

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.

Yannis Behrakis Greece, 1960–2019

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.

Sebastião Salgado Brazil, 1944–2025

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.