Samet Durgun Photographer
Index
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Queer Photographers From and Based in Germany

Journal · Field guide · Updated October 2026

Queer photographers working in Germany, across generations and cities. This is the lineage Come Get Your Honey works inside, whether it announces itself as queer subject matter or not.

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 →

Step back from asylum and migration specifically, and there’s a much larger lineage here, of 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

Who Based Key work Register
Wolfgang Tillmans Berlin / London Turner Prize 2000; Tate and MoMA surveys 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, almost 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 Kampala; Berlin or Johannesburg East African Photography Award Belonging, without fetishising
Sitara Thalia Ambrosio Germany Fragile as Glass Queer lives as conflict reportage
Leander von Thien Berlin Anatomy of the Hole, 2025 Soft, intersectional community
Malte Seidel Berlin — Diaristic, unannounced
Andrew J Burford Berlin — Masculinity and whiteness, post-apartheid
Ceren Saner Berlin Inside The Ring Queer communities across generations; the artist’s own family
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, 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, not as a subject requiring justification. He won the Turner Prize in 2000, the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win it, had a solo show at Tate Modern in 2017, and was given at MoMA in 2022–23 what the museum called his first museum survey in New York. 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 still known for his own black-and-white photography of the city's nightlife and subcultures. He is the living link between the GDR queer underground and the club culture Berlin is now known for internationally.
Florian Hetz Berlin
Photographs male bodies in extreme close-up and almost never faces. Skin, hair, scars and pressed flesh are framed with a logic he's compared to looking through a glory hole. After encephalitis in 2007 left him with partial 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. Taken together, the books are starting to read as a record of a generation growing older together more than as 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, with 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 in 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 on gender, ageing, family, race, neurodiversity and autonomy, and was shortlisted in the 2026 Most Beautiful German Books competition. It began as a portrait project and 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, not 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 or Johannesburg
Work on gender, belonging and displacement that refuses to fetishise or victimise the Black and queer bodies in it. Kwagala was in residence at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin in 2024 and won the East African Photography Award. Their own site gives two bases: Berlin on one page and Johannesburg on another.
Sitara Thalia Ambrosio Germany, b. 2002
A photojournalist on war, migration, gender and human rights. Fragile as Glass follows queer lives in Ukraine, and here queer photography becomes conflict reportage instead of club culture or portraiture.
Leander von Thien Berlin
Born in 1994 and based in Berlin; in his own words a white cis male queer photographer whose work centres on the queer community from an intersectional perspective, with bodies understood as inherently political and as a possibility of liberation. In June 2025 he showed Anatomy of the Hole: A Queer Dialogue at 48 Stunden Neukölln, a two-person exhibition with András Tibor Vizi at the Ringbar on Schwarzastraße, with the hole as its motif in a physical, symbolic and social sense.
Malte Seidel Berlin
Describes himself as a queer artist based in Berlin, and keeps a parallel practice as a painter. Diaristic pictures of bodies 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, using autobiography to show how power gets built into a body.
Ceren Saner Berlin
Born in Istanbul and based in Berlin, a self-taught lens-based artist working mostly in photography, whose artist statement says the work has predominantly autobiographical elements. The photographic series Inside The Ring took first prize at the Neukölln Art Prize in 2024, from a jury that praised how its photographs connect the lived realities of different queer communities and of several generations. Can'an, photographs of the artist's mother, Canan, and of the relationship between the two, made with the late father's old analogue camera, which the artist had repaired, shared a room with my Come Get Your Honey in Gaze and Skin in Mannheim in 2026.
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
My Come Get Your Honey doesn't announce itself as visibly queer in every frame the way some of the work above does. I'd put it closer to Petri's and Ohlert's register, where the subject is dignity and specificity first and queerness is the ground it stands on, not the headline.

Two who came before

Herbert Tobias 1924–1982
His first fashion photographs appeared in Vogue in 1953, while he was living in Paris, and he was expelled from France that same year after a scuffle with police. He made sensual black-and-white male nudes and portraits, and died of an AIDS-related illness in 1982.
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, which shows what insider photography as testimony becomes decades later.

Where mine sits

What I share with all of this is a refusal to photograph queerness as a problem to be explained. It is a way of living that doesn’t need permission to be photographed plainly.

The full Come Get Your Honey series is online. I trace the same lineage through queer artists from and based in Germany, in painting, performance, film and the novel. Most of the people above live in one city, and queer photographers in Berlin takes that city on its own terms. The narrower field is photographers of queer refugee life in Germany. 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.

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