Queer Refugee Photographers in Germany

Narrow the frame to Germany specifically, and the field gets small fast. There’s a lot of journalism, a lot of NGO imagery, a fair amount of one-off Pride coverage — and very few sustained, authored bodies of work made at the actual intersection of queerness, asylum and everyday life here. That’s not a claim about quality; it’s just a description of how thin this particular ground still is. What follows is what I know of it.

At a glance

Photographer	Based	Key work	Approach
Ashkan Shabani	Hamburg / Berlin	Queer, Life, Freedom; The Quiet Rise	His own exile, archived from inside
Sergei Stroitelev	Berlin	The Dreamers	Queer couples who left Russia after 2022
Bradley Secker	Istanbul	Long-term, with German chapters	Environmental portraiture
Samet Durgun	Berlin	Come Get Your Honey	A community, through friendship
Francesco Giordano	Munich	Rainbow Refugees (Stories)	Grown out of support networks
Steffi Eckelmann-Heller	Munich	(Un)seen–(Un)heard–(Un)covering	Portraits tied to asylum counselling
Manima	Berlin	Resonance Collective	The camera handed over
Nadja Wohlleben	Berlin	Queens Against Borders	Photojournalism, backstage and onstage
Nicholas Pfosi	—	My Heart Is on Fire	Long narratives across northern Europe

Relational work: the photographer inside the story

Ashkan Shabani Hamburg / Berlin

Queer, Life, Freedom: Archive of Resilience, shown at Kampnagel in Hamburg and at Leuphana University, maps his own exile from Iran through Turkey into German refugee accommodation, through photography, text, video and installation — an archive built from inside the experience rather than observed from outside it. In parallel, The Quiet Rise documents far-right and neo-Nazi mobilisation in Germany in hard black-and-white flash. As someone with no vote here, he treats the camera as the closest thing he has to a civic tool, and the two projects read as one warning system: a queer archive on one side, the political conditions that threaten it on the other.

Sergei Stroitelev Berlin

The Dreamers (Searching for Love in the Darkest Times): portraits of queer couples and families who left Russia after the 2022 escalation of the war and the tightening of anti-LGBTQ law, mixed with the couples' own archival photographs and diary fragments — migration as a story about memory and what was left behind, not an arrival picture. The project won a grant from Quarteera and the German Foreign Ministry's Queer Culture in Migration programme in 2024, and was recognised at Pictures of the Year Asia. Probably my closest peer in the most literal sense: two photographers on queer migration in the same city, though he stays with the couple and the rupture where I built outward into a wider community.

Bradley Secker Istanbul

More than a decade on LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and refugees from Syria, Iran and Iraq, with German chapters following people who moved on to Berlin and Heidelberg after Istanbul, where most of the project is based. Classical environmental portraiture, with symbolic detail carrying weight the pictures don't state outright.

Samet Durgun Berlin

Come Get Your Honey was made over several years with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin, out of friendships rather than assignments. Of nearly fifty people involved, around fifteen portraits carried the final series, each person choosing their own degree of visibility.

Work built out of counselling and advocacy

A second strand grew directly out of support work rather than out of an art practice looking for a subject.

Francesco Giordano Munich

Rainbow Refugees (Stories) presents the stories of LGBTQIA+ refugees in Germany, produced with journalists and photographers and Munich's queer-refugee support network, and was shown at Photo18 Munich in 2018. He photographed the Ugandan activist Edward Mutebi after Mutebi fled to Germany. Giordano works as much as an organiser and curator as a photographer, and the project has grown into exhibitions and public events rather than stopping at a series.

Steffi Eckelmann-Heller Munich

(Un)seen–(Un)heard–(Un)covering, produced with the LeTRa lesbian counselling service and shown at the Habibi Kiosk at Münchner Kammerspiele, portrays queer refugees from Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria, several of them then facing deportation. It continued into 2026 as Queer. Geflüchtet. Sichtbar. The work is tied to actual asylum counselling in Munich rather than to the art world alone, and it's unusually direct about the threat its subjects are living under.

Manima Berlin

A non-binary social worker and multimedia artist who runs empowerment and creative groups within Schwulenberatung Berlin's specialist unit for LGBTI refugees, and makes photo work with XENION, which supports survivors of political persecution. Manima also co-runs the Resonance Collective, a self-organised space for queer people, people of colour and people with refugee or migration histories to make work together. Closer to Sahat Zia Hero's model than to mine — closer to handing the camera over than to holding it.

Documentary from outside

Nadja Wohlleben Berlin

An independent photojournalist who has photographed Queens Against Borders — a Berlin-based performance collective of trans and queer refugees and immigrants — backstage and onstage, including their performance at Lollapalooza Berlin in 2025, distributed through Getty Images. The collective has raised money for gender-affirming surgery and run self-defence workshops; her pictures catch preparation and joy rather than the trauma that usually gets asked of this subject.

Nicholas Pfosi northern Europe

My Heart Is on Fire is an older project that deserves more attention than it's had — long individual narratives with LGBTQI asylum seekers, built from photography, testimony and documents together, in a mode that anticipated the multimedia approach a lot of socially engaged photography uses now.

Where this sits

Three directions, really: relational and autobiographical work where the photographer’s own position is inside the story (Shabani, Stroitelev, Secker, and — through friendship rather than shared biography — my own); photography grown out of counselling and advocacy infrastructure (Giordano, Eckelmann-Heller, Manima); and long-form documentary approaching Germany as one node in a wider European story (Wohlleben, Pfosi). Come Get Your Honey sits in the first group, and is, as far as I know, the only one in it whose subject is Berlin’s queer refugee community specifically rather than one relationship or one route through it.

One thing all three directions keep running into: photographs and photobooks from this field are increasingly being used as supporting evidence in asylum credibility assessments — a use nobody making the work originally set out to serve, and a new job for the medium.

The series is here. The wider field beyond Germany is here. What this looks like away from asylum specifically — queer photography in Germany more broadly — is here.