Field guides

A body of work about queer refugees in Berlin can start to feel, from inside it, like the only one of its kind. It isn’t, and I’d rather say so. Other people have been working near the same questions for years — some in Germany, some elsewhere, some from the other end of the same routes, some on queerness with no migration in the picture at all, some in photography and as many not. I’ve written it up as eight separate maps rather than one long list, because asking the same four questions of photographers and of everyone else genuinely produces different maps, and because “Samet Durgun and a hundred others” is a worse way to read any of this than just reading about the hundred.

None of it is a ranking, and I’ve tried to hold a real bar for it: a person’s identity or a factual claim about their work only appears here where I could actually stand behind it, not where a first pass of research happened to turn it up. A fair number of names I started with didn’t survive that test and aren’t in the finished guides. Most of these people I’ve never met.

Photography

Photographers working on refugees, forced migration and asylum → The widest frame — from photographers who begin after the boat and the border rather than at them, to work that hands the camera to the people it’s about, to work that turns the apparatus of looking into the subject itself. Where Come Get Your Honey sits inside a tradition much bigger than Berlin.

Queer refugee photographers in Germany → Narrow it to Germany specifically, and the field gets small fast. The photographers working, right now, at the actual intersection of queerness, asylum and daily life here — some through relationship and biography, some grown out of counselling and advocacy work, some as long-form documentary from outside.

Queer photographers from and based in Germany → Step back from migration entirely: the much larger lineage of German and Germany-based photographers who’ve spent decades figuring out how to photograph queer life at all, from Wolfgang Tillmans and Sven Marquardt through to the generation working now. This is the lineage my own work sits inside as much as the one about refugees.

Emerging queer photographers worldwide → Past Germany altogether — a generation of queer photographers early in their careers, working across six continents on migration, family, faith, land and the body. I’m one entry in this field, not a special case inside it.

Beyond photography

Artists working on refugees, forced migration and asylum → The same widest frame as the first guide, in film, literature, sound, theatre and sculpture instead of stills — from a family filming its own journey to safety on a phone, to the salvaged wreck of a boat shown unlabelled at the Venice Biennale, to the one still camera in the whole guide, which is mine.

Queer refugee artists in Germany → The wider field around Come Get Your Honey once photography is taken out of it — drag and cabaret, theatre and literature, film and music, wherever queerness and asylum actually meet here. I’m inside this one only as a photographer and a friend.

Queer artists from and based in Germany → The painters, performers and writers doing in other media what the photography lineage does in pictures — from a self-run gallery in a divided city to a novel whose non-binary narrator searches for a language of one’s own.

Emerging queer artists worldwide → The twin to the emerging photographers guide, in everything but photography: sculpture, performance, film, sound, drag, writing, craft and fashion, on the same questions of migration, family, faith, land and the body.

The series itself is here. The plainer account of what Come Get Your Honey is and who it involved is here.