Samet Durgun Photographer
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Photographers of Queer Refugee Life in Germany

Journal · Field guide · Updated October 2026

The photographers working, right now, at the specific intersection of queerness, asylum and life in Germany. It is a small field, and Come Get Your Honey is one part of it.

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 →

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. I’m not making a claim about quality, only describing how thin this particular ground still is. What follows is what I know of it.

At a glance

Who 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 a Berlin chapter 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 northern Europe 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 Germany, through photography, text, video and installation. It is an archive built from inside the experience, not 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, with a queer archive on one side and 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. It treats migration as a story about memory and what was left behind, not as 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. He is probably my closest peer in the most literal sense. We are 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 a Berlin chapter following people who moved on 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
I made Come Get Your Honey over several years with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin, out of friendships instead of assignments. Of nearly fifty people involved, around fifteen are portrayed in the series, each choosing their own degree of visibility.

Work built out of counselling and advocacy

A second strand grew directly out of support work, not 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 past a series into exhibitions and public events.
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 as Queer. Geflüchtet. Sichtbar. The work is tied to actual asylum counselling in Munich, not 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. The work is 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 instead of 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. It was photographed in 2017 and is still marked in progress on his site. It follows LGBTQI asylum seekers and refugees in Denmark, Germany and Sweden through long individual narratives built from photographs, testimony and documents together, such as a hand-written asylum request, an identity card and a job application letter. His own site is the only account of it I could find, so that is what this entry rests on.

Where this sits

I see three directions. The first is relational and autobiographical work where the photographer’s own position is inside the story (Shabani, Stroitelev, Secker, and my own, through friendship instead of shared biography). The second is photography grown out of counselling and advocacy infrastructure (Giordano, Eckelmann-Heller, Manima). The third is long-form documentary approaching Germany as one node in a wider European story (Wohlleben, Pfosi). I’d place Come Get Your Honey in the first group, and it is, as far as I know, the only one in it whose subject is Berlin’s queer refugee community specifically, and not one relationship or one route through it.

In my own experience at least, photographs and photobooks from this field end up as supporting evidence in asylum credibility assessments, a use nobody making the work set out to serve and a new job for the medium. Two people in Come Get Your Honey asked me for copies to give to their lawyers. I’ve written about that in what Come Get Your Honey is and who it involved.

The full Come Get Your Honey series is online. I cover the same ground in drag, theatre, literature, film and music in artists around queer refugee life in Germany. Beyond Germany, the wider field is photographers working on refugees, forced migration and asylum. Away from asylum specifically, the guide to queer photographers from and based in Germany looks at queer photography in Germany more broadly, and queer photographers in Berlin at the one city most of this page happens in. 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.

← Field guides