Queer Refugee Photography in Berlin

People sometimes ask what Come Get Your Honey is “about,” expecting a short answer. The plain answer is that it is a body of work made with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers living in Berlin, made over several years, out of relationships, not assignments.

I want to say clearly, once, in one place, who that involved and what those words mean. The two words in that sentence, refugee and asylum seeker, are not interchangeable, and the difference is not a technicality.

Refugee and asylum seeker are not the same thing

An asylum seeker is still inside the process of applying for protection. Nothing has been decided yet. A recognised refugee has been granted that status, with papers and a right to stay. Among the people in the book, some were still waiting on a decision; others already had that status. (Recognition is a legal decision; under the UNHCR definition, a person can be a refugee before anyone has recognised it.) The gap between those two positions shapes almost everything about a person’s daily life in Germany: whether they can work, where they’re allowed to live, how freely they can move, and, for queer and trans people specifically, whether being visible at all is something they can afford.

That legal line shapes what a photograph can be, too. Someone whose case is still pending can face real consequences if a recognisable image of them reaches the wrong person, such as an authority or a family member back home. Some of the people in this project could only be photographed in ways that protected them, and in every case that choice belonged to them. A few images were never published at all.

Two people in the project asked me for copies of the book to give to their lawyers, having heard it might help their case. I can’t tell you whether it did, since their status was still pending when I last knew. But I can tell you the book has been used that way, sitting in a folder as evidence that someone’s queerness or transness was real before a caseworker who needed convincing.

Who this actually is

Prince Emrah was one of the first people I photographed for this project, and one of the reasons it exists at all. Emrah is a performer from Turkmenistan, a belly dancer, and someone who has spent years building space for other queer refugee and asylum-seeking performers to have a stage. Emrah also interviewed me for the book. It was a flipped interview, so the questions ran the other way for once.

Kylie is in the project too. Years after I photographed her, she took her employer, a McDonald’s here in Berlin, to the Berlin labour court over discrimination at work. The case ended in a settlement, not a judgment. There was no finding of discrimination and no admission from the company. Asked at the first hearing what she wanted, she said she wanted to go back to work and to use the women’s changing room. I mention it because it says something true about her that a photograph alone can’t. Being seen and being safe are two different fights, and she has been willing to have both of them in public. She told the story in her own words at our talk at Fotografiska Berlin.

Nearly fifty people were part of this project in one way or another. About fifteen of them are portrayed in the final edit. The others were worth showing too, but visibility has to be chosen, person by person, and some people chose not to be recognisable. The book holds both choices with the same weight.

Where this sits

I’m German-Turkish-Abkhazian. My great-grandparents left the Caucasus for the Ottoman Empire as refugees, generations before any of this. I moved to Berlin in 2013 as a first-generation immigrant, and after more than eight years I became a German citizen. None of that makes my situation the same as the people in this book. It’s part of why I recognised something in theirs.

The work isn’t tied to one neighbourhood. I’m not going to pretend it maps cleanly onto Kreuzberg or Lichtenberg or Prenzlauer Berg, because it doesn’t, and I’d rather say that plainly than invent a geography the pictures don’t actually support. Berlin appears in this work as a city of pockets, places where people can be fully themselves, and other streets, a short walk away, where they can’t yet.

If you’re looking for practical support such as housing, legal advice or community, Schwulenberatung Berlin runs Café Kuchus, a drop-in centre for LGBTI refugees in Kreuzberg, and the nationwide Queer Refugees Deutschland project is a good place to start. This project is not a substitute for either of those, and was never meant to be.

The full Come Get Your Honey series is online. The photobook Come Get Your Honey is published by Kehrer Verlag, and a list of where the work has been exhibited has its own page.

For curators considering a presentation, exhibiting the work covers available works and enquiries. How I ask for consent, step by step, is in Listening in Practice. I also welcome invitations for artist talks on photography, consent and representation.