Samet Durgun Photographer
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Queer Photographers in Berlin

Journal · Field guide

The photographers of queer life in the city where I made Come Get Your Honey, from the West Berlin of the 1980s to the people working here now, on intimacy, nightlife, gender, migration and exile.

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 →

Most of the people in my guide to queer photographers in Germany turn out to live in one city, and it is the one I live in. That’s not an accident. Berlin has been somewhere queer life could be photographed plainly for longer than most places, first in the West of the 1980s, then in the emptied-out East after 1990, and now in a city that people from Uganda, Russia, Iran, Bosnia and Syria have come to for the same reason. I made Come Get Your Honey here, with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers, and it sits inside all of that. This guide takes the city on its own terms and asks who has photographed queer Berlin, from where, and what the pictures were for.

Two rules, so the list means something. I call someone a queer photographer only where they say so themselves or an institution that knows them does; the others are here for what they photographed, and I say which is which. And “based in Berlin” is a fact with a date on it. I checked everyone’s own site or a current institutional biography in September 2026, and where the sources disagree I say so at the end instead of picking one.

At a glance

Who Based Key work What Berlin gave it
Wolfgang Tillmans Berlin / London Turner Prize 2000; Tate and MoMA surveys A studio, and a building for Between Bridges
Spyros Rennt Berlin Lust Surrender, Corporeal, Intertwined Fifteen years of one generation’s nights
Florian Hetz Berlin Three books A city where the close-up needs no excuse
Malte Seidel Berlin Painting and diaristic photographs Ordinary Berlin, queerness unannounced
Leander von Thien Berlin Anatomy of the Hole, 2025 A Neukölln bar as a gallery
Sven Marquardt Berlin Die Nacht ist Leben Prenzlauer Berg under surveillance, then Berghain
Nihad Nino Pušija Berlin Duldung; Queens SO36 and Gayhane, from a Roma refugee’s side of the room
Annette Frick Berlin Take a Walk on the Wild Side Drag, activism and AIDS in the 1980s and 90s
Vincent Wechselberger Berlin READY Queer sex work, from inside
Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert Berlin / Munich Gender as a Spectrum, Bigger Eighty portraits across the spectrum
Andrew J Burford Berlin Photography, video, performance Post-apartheid masculinity, seen from here
Ilya Zakharin Berlin BODY Classical light against the flash-lit norm
Matt Lambert Berlin VITIUM Explicit desire, gallery and commerce
Rinaldo Hopf Berlin Mein schwules Auge The publishing that holds the rest up
Samet Durgun Berlin Come Get Your Honey A refugee community, through friendship
Sergei Stroitelev Berlin The Dreamers Queer couples who left Russia after 2022
Manima Berlin Resonance Collective The camera handed to LGBTI refugees
Nadja Wohlleben Berlin Queens Against Borders Backstage with a trans and queer refugee collective
Tobias Zielony Berlin The Citizen The Oranienplatz refugee movement, at the Venice Biennale
Jürgen Baldiga 1959–1993 Archive at the Schwules Museum West Berlin through the AIDS years
Herbert Tobias 1924–1982 Held by the Berlinische Galerie The forerunner

Intimacy, friendship, the everyday

Wolfgang Tillmans Berlin / London
The way of seeing most of the younger people on this page work inside. A portrait of a lover pinned to the wall next to a still life and a light abstraction, queer friendship treated as ordinary reality and not as a subject needing a case made for it. He has split his time between Berlin and London since 2007, and his exhibition space Between Bridges moved from London to Tiergarten in 2014 and in 2022 into a six-storey corner building he designed in Kreuzberg. The Turner Prize, Tate Modern and MoMA are the biography. The building is the Berlin part.
Spyros Rennt Berlin
Has photographed the city's queer nightlife since 2011, and the self-published books, Lust Surrender, Corporeal and Intertwined, have moved from the charge of the early pictures toward embraces, diptychs and quiet mornings. Read in order they are a record of one Berlin generation getting older together, which no single night out could show.
Florian Hetz Berlin
Male bodies in extreme close-up, almost never a face. Skin, hair, scars, pressed flesh, framed the way he's said looking through a glory hole frames things. Photographing daily life began as a way of keeping a record after encephalitis in 2007 took part of his memory, and became the practice. Three books and a Deutsche Börse Photography Prize longlisting later, the argument is still that queer sexuality deserves the same visual ordinariness as anyone's.
Malte Seidel Berlin
Calls himself a queer artist based in Berlin, and paints alongside the photographs. Diaristic pictures of bodies and of an ordinary Berlin where queerness is present without any frame having to announce it.
Leander von Thien Berlin
Born in 1994, and in his own words a white cis male queer photographer working on the queer community from an intersectional position, with bodies understood as political. Anatomy of the Hole: A Queer Dialogue, with András Tibor Vizi, was shown in June 2025 at the Ringbar on Schwarzastraße for 48 Stunden Neukölln. A bar in Neukölln as the gallery is about as Berlin as a venue gets.

Nightlife, and the city as a record

Sven Marquardt Berlin
Photographed friends and muses in East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg through the 1980s, in hard black and white, under a state where looking different meant being watched. Berghain's doorman since before it was Berghain, and still photographing the city's nightlife and subcultures. He is the living link between the GDR queer underground and the club culture Berlin now sells abroad.
Nihad Nino Pušija Berlin
The name I most wanted on this page, and the one none of my Germany guides had. Born in Sarajevo in 1965, he came to Berlin in 1992 as the Bosnian war began, on a one-way train ticket from Belgrade, on a tourist visa, then a Duldung, then asylum. His 1997 photobook Duldung followed four Roma families from Bosnia through that same "tolerated" status from inside it; people let him photograph them eating and sleeping because he was one of them, and Duldung Deluxe later followed the deportations. He showed in the first Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. And in 2020 the Schwules Museum showed Queens, his photographs of queer, post-migrant Berlin in the 1990s, at SO36 above all, at Gayhane – House of Halay and the Black Gay Nights, with Queen Kenny at the 1996 Teddy Awards among them. He photographed it as subject matter, and I don't know his own identity and don't claim it. What I know is that a refugee with a camera was in the room where queer migrant Berlin was inventing itself, thirty years before I was in a similar one.
Annette Frick Berlin
Born in Bonn in 1957, she lives and works in Berlin, and since the 1990s the portraitist of a rebellious Berlin subculture: drag queens, activists and the queer figures who shaped the nightlife and the AIDS activism of the 80s and 90s, Ovo Maltine and Ichgola Androgyn among them. Analogue, black and white, close. The point her galleries make, and I'd repeat, is that this scene was every bit as wild as New York's and almost nobody outside the city knew. Her prints are held by the Hamburger Bahnhof, the Schwules Museum and the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

Bodies, gender, work

Vincent Wechselberger Berlin
READY, made soon after his Ostkreuzschule graduation, draws on his own experience of queer sex work and photographs other sex workers from the inside. Under the explicit surface the subject is class, labour and who gets to make the picture of a marginal life.
Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert Berlin / Munich
Gender as a Spectrum (2016) grew to around eighty portraits treating gender multiplicity as a starting point and not a curiosity. Bigger turned to larger male bodies; Mit Euren Spuren pairs young queer photographers with LGBTQIA+ seniors.
Andrew J Burford Berlin
South African, working across photography, video, performance and installation on masculinity, whiteness and a post-apartheid upbringing, using his own biography to show how power gets built into a body. One of several people here for whom Berlin is the distance that made looking back possible.
Ilya Zakharin Berlin
A photographer and art director whose first book, BODY (2024), photographs sexuality and physicality in a controlled, classical light, against the flash-lit look the city is known for.
Matt Lambert Berlin
Between fashion campaigns and explicit queer film as Die Lamb, carrying sexual directness into the commercial and the gallery space alike.
Rinaldo Hopf Berlin
Co-editor of Mein schwules Auge for many years, and for decades the builder of the publishing and exhibition infrastructure without which a lot of the work on this page would have had nowhere to go.

Migration, exile, belonging

This is the corner of the city my own work lives in, and it is smaller than the rest of the page. Most photography of migration in Berlin is journalism made on assignment. What follows is the sustained work, by people who stayed.

Samet Durgun Berlin
I made Come Get Your Honey over several years with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin, out of friendships and not assignments. Of nearly fifty people involved, around fifteen are portrayed, each choosing how visible to be. It was shown here at Fotografiska Berlin and the Museum für Fotografie, and Kehrer published the book in 2021.
Sergei Stroitelev Berlin
The Dreamers: portraits of queer couples and families who left Russia after 2022, with their own archive pictures and diary fragments mixed in, so that migration reads as memory and what was left, not as arrival. Funded through Quarteera's Queer Culture in Migration programme in 2024. My closest peer in the plainest sense: two photographers on queer migration in one city. He stays with the couple and the rupture; I built outward into a community.
Manima Berlin
A non-binary social worker and multimedia artist who runs empowerment and creative groups in Schwulenberatung Berlin's unit for LGBTI refugees, makes photo work with XENION, which supports survivors of political persecution, and co-runs the Resonance Collective, a self-organised space for queer people, people of colour and people with refugee histories to make work together. Closer to handing the camera over than to holding it.
Nadja Wohlleben Berlin
An independent photojournalist who has photographed Queens Against Borders, the Berlin performance collective of trans and queer refugees and immigrants, backstage and on stage, including Lollapalooza Berlin in 2025. Preparation and joy, where this subject usually gets asked for trauma.
Tobias Zielony Berlin
Here for the work and not for any claim about him. The Citizen followed refugee-movement activists in Berlin and Hamburg from February 2014, among them Napuli Langa, who lived in a tree for five days against the clearing of the Oranienplatz camp in Kreuzberg, and co-represented Germany at the 2015 Venice Biennale, with a newspaper of the activists' own essays and interviews, and the pictures run in twelve dailies across Uganda, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana and Sudan. It is the political photograph of Berlin's refugee years, and mine is the domestic one.

Who came before, and who passed through

Jürgen Baldiga 1959–1993
Lovers, friends and drag performers through the AIDS years in West Berlin, and self-portraits of his own illness, thousands of photographs and forty diaries, held with the Schwules Museum. Markus Stein's documentary Baldiga – Entsichertes Herz screened at the Berlinale in 2024. He is what insider photography as testimony turns into thirty years on, and the reason a museum in this city has the archive at all.
Herbert Tobias 1924–1982
Vogue in 1953, expelled from France the same year after a scuffle with police. Sensual black-and-white male nudes and portraits, and one of the first prominent artists in Germany to die of an AIDS-related illness. The Berlinische Galerie holds his work.
Nan Goldin passed through, from 1991
Not a Berlin photographer, and the one outsider I'll allow, because she said it herself. She came on a DAAD scholarship in 1991, has kept coming back, and has called those the best years of her life. Frick, Baldiga and Pušija were photographing the same rooms from inside the city, which is the difference this guide is about.

The rooms

A city’s photography is also where it gets shown and kept. The Schwules Museum holds Baldiga’s archive and Frick’s prints and gave Pušija’s Queens a room; the Berlinische Galerie holds Tobias. Fotografiska Berlin and the Museum für Fotografie are where my own series hung. And outside photography, the Stadtmuseum’s Time Machine Infinitum, by Noam Gorbat, Omar Nicolas and Sama Ahmadi, is at the Humboldt Forum until January 2028, a multimedia installation that runs queer migrant Berlin from the 1920s through ADEFRA and the OYA Collective to the ballroom scene. If you want the history the photographs above sit inside, that room has it.

Where mine sits

Come Get Your Honey is the domestic, relational end of the migration corner of this page, and the Berlin-specific end of my Germany guide. It doesn’t announce queerness in every frame the way Rennt’s or Hetz’s pictures do. I’d put it nearer Ohlert’s register, where dignity and specificity come first and queerness is the ground.

I’ve written about what Come Get Your Honey is and who it involved, and the full series is online. The wider lineage is queer photographers from and based in Germany; the narrower one is photographers of queer refugee life in Germany. The same city’s drag, theatre, film and writing are in artists around queer refugee life in Germany. All ten 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. Locations were checked in September 2026 against each person's own site or a current institutional biography. Two I left off this page for that reason: DeLovie Kwagala, who had a residency at SAVVY Contemporary in 2024 and whose own site now says Johannesburg; and Ashkan Shabani, whose biography says only "based in Germany". Both are in the Germany guides.

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