Field guides

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 a body of work like that 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 and 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 eleven separate maps instead of one long list. Asking the same four questions of photographers and of everyone else produces different maps, a shelf of books is a different map again, and “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, running from photographers who begin after the boat and the border instead of 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. It shows where my own Come Get Your Honey sits inside a tradition much bigger than Berlin.

Photographers who stayed: migration photography after arrival → Most photography of migration stops at the border, the boat or the camp. This guide starts after that, with the photographers who stayed with the same people once they had arrived, for years, and have a book or an exhibition to show for it. It is a short list on purpose, and it says why.

Photographers of queer refugee life in Germany → Narrow it to Germany specifically, and the field gets small fast. This guide is about the photographers working now where queerness, asylum and daily life meet 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 and there is 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.

Queer photographers in Berlin → Most of the people in the guide above turn out to live in the city I live in, so this one takes Berlin on its own terms: who has photographed queer life here, from the West Berlin of the 1980s and the SO36 of the 1990s to the people working now on intimacy, gender, migration and exile. It is the page where Come Get Your Honey has its nearest neighbours.

Emerging queer photographers worldwide → This one goes past Germany altogether, to 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.

Photobooks on queer refugees, asylum and migration → The same field as books instead of people: the five published photobooks on queer refugees and asylum I could verify, the wider shelf on forced migration they sit inside, and the projects that never became books. It is a short shelf, and my Come Get Your Honey turns out to be the only book on it made in Germany.

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. It runs 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.

Artists around queer refugee life in Germany → The wider field around Come Get Your Honey once photography is taken out of it. That means 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 full Come Get Your Honey series is online, and there is a plainer account of what Come Get Your Honey is and who it involved.