Samet Durgun Photographer
Index
EN

Photographers Who Stayed: Migration Photography After Arrival

Journal · Field guide · Updated October 2026

A field guide to migration photography after arrival: photographers who stayed with the same people in Europe for years, with a book or an exhibition to show for it. Where my own work sits.

I’m Samet Durgun, a photographer in Berlin. I made Come Get Your Honey with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers in this city, and in these guides I gather the photographers and artists working near the same questions.Full statement, biography and CV → Field guides →

Much photography of migration is made at the border, on a boat or in a camp. This guide is about migration photography after arrival: photographers who stayed with the same people once they had arrived, in one place, for years, and made something you can look at. I made Come Get Your Honey that way, in Berlin, and I wanted to know who else had.

The short answer for Europe: Olivier Jobard in France, Felipe Romero Beltrán in Spain, Rich Wiles with Ruba al-Hindawi in England, and Thomas Byczkowski and Jennifer Zumbusch in Germany, with a few earlier names behind them.

Four rules, so the list means something. The people were already where the pictures were made, so border, boat, camp and transit work is under reference points. It is the same people over years, not a season and not a different group every time. There is something to look at, a book with a publisher or an exhibition at a named institution, and two entries have neither yet and say so. And it was made since 2000, with a short section on earlier work.

I checked each person in October 2026 against their own site, their publisher or the museum that showed the work, and where the sources disagree I say so in the entry and don’t pick one. Most of the names I looked at fell at the same test, the one about the same people.

At a glance

Who Based Key work The staying
Olivier Jobard Paris Notre famille afghane, Les éditions de Juillet One family, from 2010
Felipe Romero Beltrán Paris / Madrid Dialect, 2023 Nine men in Seville, three years
Sibylle Fendt Berlin Holzbachtal, nothing, nothing, 2020 One shelter, 2015–2018
Thomas Byczkowski Hamburg Menschen – keine Zahlen, 2019 A few refugees, about two years
Rich Wiles and Ruba al-Hindawi North of England In Which Language Do We Dream?, 2021 One family, from 2017
Nihad Nino Pušija Berlin Duldung, 1997; Duldung Deluxe, 2010 Roma families from Bosnia
Thana Faroq Netherlands how shall we greet the sun, 2023 A group she belongs to, about two years
Farren van Wyk Netherlands Mixedness is my Mythology, 2026 Her own family, since 2021
Jennifer Zumbusch Bonn Ankommen in Deutschland One family, from 2015, no book yet
Maria Feck Hamburg The New Arrivals, Spiegel Online One family, about eighteen months, no book
Candida Höfer Cologne Türken in Deutschland, 1970s Cologne and Düsseldorf, to 1979
Brigitte Kraemer Herne So nah, so fern, 2000 Families in the Ruhr, from 1985
Henning Christoph Essen Mustafas Traum, 2021 The Ruhr, 1977–1989
Rineke Dijkstra Netherlands Almerisa One girl, 1994–2008
Patrick Zachmann Paris Ma proche banlieue, 2009 Marseille in 1984, and again from 2005
Samet Durgun Berlin Come Get Your Honey, 2021 Nearly fifty people, from 2018

Who stayed with the same people after arrival

Olivier Jobard Paris
He is French, and nothing I found says he is a migrant himself. In 2010 he met a boy in France and has kept photographing him since, later with the boy's brothers and sisters. A first strand was shown at Visa pour l'Image in Perpignan in 2018. The second became the book Notre famille afghane (Les éditions de Juillet) and an exhibition at the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris in October 2024, whose text quotes his method: "je reste avec les gens aussi longtemps qu'ils veulent de moi" (I stay with people for as long as they want me). Visa pour l'Image and his publisher give eight years for the first strand and the Académie gives ten, so I give the start and not a length.
Felipe Romero Beltrán Paris / Madrid
Nine young men who came from Morocco and live in Seville, photographed over three years, from 2020 to 2023. Loose Joints published Dialect in April 2023, 176 pages in English and Spanish, with texts by several contributors, one of them one of the men. It won the Foam Paul Huf Award that year, and Dazed reported the Foam show in Amsterdam in 2024, where it quotes him saying the timeline "gave me the opportunity to develop it over a long period of time with the same people".
Sibylle Fendt Berlin
From February 2015 until the shelter closed in December 2018 she visited H8, a collective shelter for asylum seekers in the Black Forest, regularly, mostly for three to five days. Huck counts fourteen visits over three years. She photographed the young men from several African countries and the Middle East who lived there. Kehrer published Holzbachtal, nothing, nothing in 2020, 168 pages, and the Ostkreuz show KONTINENT opened at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in October 2020. She has said the best way to convey the place's seclusion is "to concentrate on what is happening, and to work with repetition". H8 is in a village and not a city, and I found nothing that says the same men were there each time, so it only half meets my second rule. Fendt also took the portrait of me on my information page, and Kehrer is my publisher too. We sat on a Kehrer panel together in 2021.
Thomas Byczkowski Hamburg
Followed a few refugees who had arrived in Hamburg in 2015 and 2016, from the start of 2017 for about two years. The result is a free 68-page photo book as a PDF, Menschen – keine Zahlen, published by the Bertelsmann Stiftung in January 2019, and a show in the foundation's own foyer with four black-and-white story sequences. The publisher is a foundation and not a trade house. He also taught the people he photographed German and helped them with the authorities. One family is followed through several homes.
Rich Wiles and Ruba al-Hindawi North of England
Wiles began working in 2017 with Ruba al-Hindawi, who had settled in the north of England, and her family. Impressions Gallery in Bradford showed the result from 7 August to 13 November 2021, curated by Anne McNeill, with a newspaper, and the show toured to Leicester, Oldham and Scarborough until January 2025. Ruba is credited with Wiles as author of the newspaper, and its photographs are Wiles's, hers and her children's. Wiles says working together "attempts to challenge power structures that can be inherent in some photography projects". It was on the walls at Impressions in October 2021, the month I gave my Photobook Fair talk for the gallery.

Their own people

Nihad Nino Pušija Berlin
Came to Berlin from Sarajevo in 1992, during the war, and photographed Roma families from Bosnia in the city. Duldung was shown at the NGBK in 1997. Duldung Deluxe was shown from 2010 at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and turned to Roma youth from Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia. He told The Berliner that he could come close because he was "an insider, not a German". I found no source that says whether the same families appear across the years, so he is here for the insider's view and not for a documented return. He is also in my guide to queer photographers in Berlin, for Queens.
Thana Faroq Netherlands
About two years in the Netherlands with a small group of young women who came there from several countries. She was born in Yemen and is one of the group herself. The book, how shall we greet the sun, was published by Lecturis in 2023, and the work was shown in Grounding – Stories of Migration at De StadsGalerij in Breda in 2024. Her statement says: "My goal is to explore our emotional interior landscape in light of the changes that we go through." The two years rest on an undated line of her own, so read the span as approximate.
Farren van Wyk Netherlands
Born in South Africa in 1993, she moved to the Netherlands with her family at six, and since 2021 has photographed them at home. This is migration decades on and made with relatives, so it is a different kind of staying from the rest of this list. The portraits and staged moments in Mixedness is my Mythology are made with her family as collaborators. She calls it "an intimate family project". The book is from Fw:Books and Deadbeat Club Press (2026), and Fotomuseum Den Haag gave it her first solo museum show in 2026, with more than fifty photographs.

Without a book, yet

Two entries fail the rule about something to look at, and I’m keeping them because the years and the same family are real.

Jennifer Zumbusch Bonn
Met one family in 2015 through a camera project she started at a refugee accommodation in Bonn, and has kept going back. Ankommen in Deutschland (Arriving in Germany) runs from 2015 on her own pages, with 2025 given as the end, though the last dated pictures are from 2024. There is no book. Her own list gives a solo show at the Buchmesse Migration in Bonn in 2017, an exhibition with the collective Elf Perspektiven in 2018, and an appearance at the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn in 2018, a family Sunday and a report in the museum magazine. I found no solo show at a museum or gallery. By the same list it has also appeared in group shows, among them FREELENS's bitte warten… in 2017 and sichverbinden in Düsseldorf in 2024. Her site says she visits to record "die ständigen räumlichen und persönlichen Veränderungen" (the constant spatial and personal changes).
Maria Feck (with Eva Thöne) Hamburg
With the Spiegel Online writer Eva Thöne she followed one family settling in Germany for about eighteen months, from 2017 into 2018, in the series The New Arrivals. I found no book and no exhibition of it, so it is on Spiegel Online and won the projects category of the 2018 KAUSA Medienpreis, shared with Thöne for a multimedia story from the collaboration. Asked what makes a good portrait, she answered: "Man sollte auch einmal ohne die Kamera dabei sein, den Menschen zuhören und Vertrauen aufbauen" (you should also sometimes be there without the camera, listen to people and build trust). I couldn't open the Spiegel pages, so I can't tell you more about the pictures.

Who came before

Most of this work was made before 2000. Only some of it meets the rule about the same people, and each entry says how.

Candida Höfer Cologne
Her series Türken in Deutschland was made in Cologne and the Düsseldorf region between the early 1970s and 1979, with Turkish families who had come to West Germany through the guest-worker programme. The pictures begin in Cologne parks and, once the families invited her into their homes, move indoors. She is German and made them alone. The work is 80 colour slides dated 1979. The Museo Reina Sofía holds it, M HKA's Ensembles archive documents it as courtesy of the artist, and it was shown at Museum Morsbroich in 2009. I found no record of return visits to the same families, and her later work is architectural interiors.
Brigitte Kraemer Herne, Ruhr
Photographed families who had come to the Ruhr from Turkey and other countries, in Herne, Essen, Duisburg and Bochum among other towns, starting on a year's grant in 1985, with pictures dated to 1998. Klartext published the book So nah, so fern in 2000, and her own text on the Pixelprojekt page says: "Die Kontakte, die damals zu verschiedenen ausländischen Familien entstanden sind, bestehen heute noch" (the contacts made back then with various foreign families still exist today). The Ruhr Museum's survey of her work, Wie man lebt – wo man lebt, has a section on these long-term projects and was extended to 4 April 2027. The sources date no return visits, so she is here and not in the main list.
Henning Christoph Essen
Photographed in Essen and the wider Ruhr from 1977 to 1989, among Turkish labour migrants and their families who had settled in West Germany: work, weddings, home. The first pictures went to GEO magazine, which ran a reportage in 1979, and he kept photographing for another ten years. The work is in Mustafas Traum, a 240-page book from Klartext Verlag in 2021, and in a Ruhr Museum show in Essen from October 2021 to October 2022. He says of those years: "Ich war ständig dort und auch akzeptiert" (I was constantly there and was accepted).
Rineke Dijkstra Netherlands
Almerisa follows one girl, then a young woman, in the Netherlands: eleven portraits from 1994 to 2008, the first at a reception centre in Leiden. Dijkstra has said she first visited every six months, then "started to make pictures every two years". There is no book of the series alone; the Stedelijk Museum showed it in 2005–06, and the complete run is in the 2012 retrospective catalogue from Guggenheim Museum Publications. It begins before 2000, though most of the portraits were made after it, and it follows one person.
Patrick Zachmann Paris
The Marseille sequence of Ma proche banlieue, a retrospective covering 1980 to 2007. In 1984 he gave cameras to eleven teenagers from the city's northern districts, most of them children of immigrant families, and had them work for six months on their own identity. From 2005 he looked for them again, which became his film Bar Centre des Autocars (2007). It was shown at the Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration in Paris in 2009 and published by Éditions Xavier Barral that year, with the film on a DVD, as one part of a larger book. Most of it was made before 2000.

Four more come before 2000 and fail the test: each is a survey of a community or one season of work, and none shows a return to the same people. Bertien van Manen’s Vrouwen te gast (Sara, 1979) photographs labour-migrant women and migrants’ wives in the Netherlands, and Fw:Books published a new edit in 2024 as I Am the Only Woman There, with pictures from her archive and new texts. Çiğdem Yüksel later sought out some of the same women. Mehmet Ünal, who came to Germany in 1976, has photographed Turkish labour migrants since the 1970s, and his work has been shown at the Völklinger Hütte and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. Lisl Ponger’s Fremdes Wien (Wieser, 1993) was made in Vienna in 1991 to 1993 for a weekly paper, mostly at public events the communities held. And Ergun Çağatay’s Wir sind von hier is a reportage he made between March and May 1990 for the Paris agency Gamma, which lay in his private archive until 2015 and was shown at the Ruhr Museum in 2021.

Reference points

Two works sit outside this list because both record transit. Daniel Castro Garcia’s Foreigner covers migration into Europe in 2015 and 2016: arrivals in Italy from North Africa, Greece and the Balkan route, and the camps at Calais and Idomeni. Richard Mosse’s Incoming (MACK, 2017) points a thermal camera at crossings and camps and was shown at the Barbican the same year. Castro Garcia has also worked since 2017 with one group of young people at a reception centre in Sicily, in I Peri N’Tera, a project that began in 2015 and is on his website, and I found no book or exhibition of it.

Two more are close and still not the same thing. Tina Enghoff’s Migrant Documents (Journal, 2013) was made in Copenhagen in 2011 and 2012 with undocumented migrants, in seven series, anonymous by design. Andrea Diefenbach’s Land ohne Eltern (Kehrer, 2012; new edition 2016) returns to the same Moldovan households in Moldova and in Italy, but most of it is about the children who stayed behind.

If you want the counterpart to both, a book made in a German city after arrival, over years, with the people in it, there are two in this guide: Byczkowski’s Menschen – keine Zahlen and mine. Mine is the one made with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming people.

Left out, and why

Some names will come up when you go looking, so here is the test each one failed. Heike Steinweg’s Ich habe mich nicht verabschiedet (Seemann, 2018) is 33 studio portraits of women in exile in Berlin, made since 2015, each with a text by the woman herself. The museum says she talked with them at length before she took out the camera, and I found no sign of return visits over years. Maziar Moradi’s Ich werde deutsch is sixteen staged images of different people, one scene each. Çiğdem Yüksel’s Je moest eens weten (nai010, 2024) is 22 first-generation women from Turkey, each with a new portrait from a mobile studio, interviews and family-album pictures. She did look up some of the women Bertien van Manen photographed in 1979, but I could not find repeat visits to the same people over years. If you know a book that belongs here and I’ve missed it, tell me.

Where to see the work

A curator can go and see most of this. The Ruhr Museum in Essen has shown Çağatay, Christoph and now Kraemer. Museum Ludwig’s In Situ: Photo Stories on Migration, curated by Ela Kaçel and Barbara Engelbach with DOMiD, set private photographs by workers who arrived under recruitment agreements beside professional pictures of Cologne in 2021. The Museum Europäischer Kulturen in Berlin ran daHEIM from July 2016, in which people who had fled took over the walls themselves. FOTODOK’s show at De StadsGalerij in Breda, Fotomuseum Den Haag and Impressions Gallery are above. And in Berlin, Fotografiska Berlin and the Museum für Fotografie are where my own series hung.

Where mine sits

Come Get Your Honey is after arrival, with the same people, over years. I started it in 2018 and it is ongoing. 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 it. They are queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin, and I am not one of them: I am German-Turkish-Abkhazian, I came to Berlin in 2013, and I describe myself as a social exile. I made it out of friendships and not assignments, and before there was a book we looked at the pictures together and took things out.

I looked at the German books and shows above for any record of the people in them having a say in which pictures went in, and found none, in either direction. Publishers rarely say. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I’d rather there were more.

How I work with the people in it is in Listening in Practice, and the full series is online. This guide picks up after my guide to photographers working on refugees, forced migration and asylum, where the work mostly ends at arrival. The narrower ones are the queer refugee photographers in Germany and the photobooks on queer refugees, asylum and migration. All eleven field guides sit together on one page.

Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where a photographer has their own site, their name links to it. I checked each against a primary page in October 2026. Three I could not open and say so in the entries: Foam's own page for Dialect (the show rests on Dazed), the Spiegel Online pages for Maria Feck, and Jennifer Zumbusch's FREELENS and Düsseldorf pages (the dates come from her own list).

← Field guides