Queer Photographers From and Based in Germany

Step back from asylum and migration specifically, and there’s a much larger lineage here: German and Germany-based photographers who’ve spent decades figuring out how to photograph queer life at all — desire, community, gender, nightlife, ordinary domestic time — without flattening it into a statement. My own work sits inside this lineage as much as it sits inside anything about refugees. This is who I read it against.

At a glance

Photographer	Based	Key work	Register
Wolfgang Tillmans	Berlin / London	Turner Prize 2000; Tate, MoMA retrospectives	Queer everydayness as ordinary reality
Sven Marquardt	Berlin	Die Nacht ist Leben	GDR underground to Berghain
Florian Hetz	Berlin	Three books	Bodies in close-up, never faces
Spyros Rennt	Berlin	Lust Surrender, Corporeal, Intertwined	A generation, archived in print
Vincent Wechselberger	Berlin	READY	Sex work, from inside
Ilya Zakharin	Berlin	BODY	Classical light on contemporary bodies
Matt Lambert	Berlin	VITIUM	Explicit desire, gallery and commerce
Jeannette Petri	Freiburg / Frankfurt	Beyond Binary	Non-binary lives across generations
Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert	Berlin / Munich	Gender as a Spectrum, Bigger	A decade on gender
DeLovie Kwagala	Berlin	East African Photography Award	Belonging, without fetishising
Sitara Thalia Ambrosio	Germany / Ukraine	Fragile as Glass	Queer lives as conflict reportage
Leander von Thien	Berlin	PhotoVogue	Soft, intersectional community
Malte Seidel	Berlin	—	Diaristic, unannounced
Andrew J Burford	Berlin	—	Masculinity and whiteness, post-apartheid
Rinaldo Hopf	Berlin	Mein schwules Auge	The infrastructure builder
Samet Durgun	Berlin	Come Get Your Honey	Dignity first; queerness as the ground
Herbert Tobias	1924–1982	Vogue Paris, 1953	The forerunner
Jürgen Baldiga	1959–1993	Archive at the Schwules Museum	Testimony through the AIDS crisis

How queer intimacy gets photographed at all

Wolfgang Tillmans Berlin / London

His unframed, pinned installations put a portrait of a lover on the same footing as a still life or an abstract light work, and presented queer friendship and non-conforming gender as ordinary lived reality rather than a subject requiring justification. Turner Prize in 2000 — the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win it — and retrospectives at Tate Modern in 2017 and MoMA in 2022–23. Almost every younger photographer of queer everyday life in Germany now works inside the way of seeing he opened up, whether they know it or not.

Sven Marquardt Berlin

Photographed friends and muses in East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg through the 1980s, in high-contrast black-and-white, under a regime where looking different meant surveillance. Berghain's head doorman since before it was Berghain, and its resident photographer — the living link between the GDR queer underground and the club culture Berlin is now known for internationally.

Florian Hetz Berlin

Male bodies in extreme close-up, almost never faces — skin, hair, scars, pressed flesh, with a framing logic he's compared to looking through a glory hole. After encephalitis in 2007 left him with severe short-term memory loss, photographing daily life became a way of keeping a record before it became a practice; three books and a Deutsche Börse Photography Prize longlisting followed. The argument underneath the close framing is that queer sexuality deserves the same visual ordinariness as anyone else's.

Spyros Rennt Berlin

Has photographed Berlin's queer nightlife since 2011, and his self-published books — Lust Surrender, Corporeal, Intertwined — have moved from the explicit charge of that early work toward diptychs, embraces and quiet domestic moments. He publishes physical books deliberately, as an uncensored archive in an era of algorithmic moderation and rising rents; the accumulation is starting to read as a record of a generation growing older together, rather than another set of party pictures.

Bodies, class, and the record of a scene

Vincent Wechselberger Berlin

READY, made shortly after his Ostkreuzschule graduation, draws on his own experience of queer sex work and photographs other sex workers from the inside — friends, queer bodies and himself forming one continuous personal archive. Beneath the explicit surface the real subject is class, labour, and who gets to construct an image of a marginalised life in the first place.

Ilya Zakharin Berlin

A photographer and art director whose debut book BODY (2024) shoots sexuality and physicality with deliberate reference to Renaissance painting and classical sculpture — a more controlled, classical register than Berlin's usual flash-heavy nightlife look.

Matt Lambert Berlin

Working between luxury fashion campaigns and explicit queer art film under the name Die Lamb, he carries sexual directness into commercial and gallery spaces alike, treating bodily pleasure as a legitimate subject for both.

Gender as the subject, not the background

Jeannette Petri Freiburg / Frankfurt

Beyond Binary pairs portraits of non-binary people across generations with the participants' own handwritten texts — gender, ageing, family, race, neurodiversity, autonomy — and was shortlisted for one of Germany's most beautiful book awards. A portrait project that became a collective document.

Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert Berlin / Munich

A decade moving through gender as a subject from several directions: Gender as a Spectrum (2016) grew to around eighty portraits treating gender multiplicity as a starting point rather than a curiosity; Bigger turns to larger male bodies; Mit Euren Spuren pairs younger queer photographers with LGBTQIA+ seniors.

A wider circle

DeLovie Kwagala Kampala / Berlin

Work on gender, belonging and displacement that refuses to fetishise or victimise the Black and queer bodies in it — an East African perspective inside Berlin's photography ecosystem, and a winner of the East African Photography Award.

Sitara Thalia Ambrosio Fürth, b. 2002

A photojournalist on war, migration, gender and human rights. Fragile as Glass follows queer lives in Ukraine — here queer photography becomes conflict reportage rather than club culture or portraiture.

Leander von Thien Berlin

Soft, calm images centred on queer community from an intersectional angle; the body as the place where masculinity, prejudice and liberation meet.

Malte Seidel Berlin

Diaristic pictures of bodies, landscape and ordinary Berlin that let queerness be present without every frame needing to announce it.

Andrew J Burford Berlin

South African, working across photography, video, performance and installation on masculinity, whiteness and his post-apartheid upbringing — autobiography used to show how power gets built into a body.

Rinaldo Hopf Berlin

Long-time co-editor of Mein schwules Auge, and for decades a builder of the publishing and exhibition infrastructure that lets a lot of the work above exist at all.

Samet Durgun Berlin

Come Get Your Honey doesn't announce itself as visibly queer in every frame the way some of the work above does — it's closer to Petri's and Ohlert's register, where the subject is dignity and specificity first and queerness is the ground it stands on rather than the headline.

Two who came before

Herbert Tobias 1924–1982

The first German photographer to shoot for Vogue Paris, in 1953 — and expelled from France that same year for protesting a police raid on a gay venue. He made sensual black-and-white male nudes and portraits decades before Mapplethorpe, in a country where the gay press circulated covertly, and was among the first prominent artists in Germany to die of an AIDS-related illness.

Jürgen Baldiga 1959–1993

Photographed lovers, friends and drag performers through the AIDS crisis in West Berlin, including self-portraits of his own illness, leaving thousands of photographs and forty diaries. His archive, held with the Schwules Museum, is having a real resurgence now — proof of what insider photography as testimony becomes decades later.

Where mine sits

What I share with all of this is the refusal of the alternative: photographing queerness as a problem to be explained, rather than a way of living that doesn’t need permission to be photographed plainly.

The series is here. The narrower field — queer refugee photographers specifically — is here.