Samet Durgun
Come Get Your Honey
In the series Come Get Your Honey, Berlin-based photographer Samet Durgun, a first-generation immigrant of Turkish-Abkhazian descent, traces the lives of LGBTQIA+ refugees and asylum seekers in the city. Based on the guiding principle that photography relies as much on listening as it does on pressing the shutter, Durgun isn’t merely interested in looking; he wants to foster mutual learning and let that shared understanding inform everything he creates.
Come Get Your Honey shows lives full of beauty, creativity, and resilience, while acknowledging the structural barriers and social marginalization. The series is a quiet manifesto for a different way of seeing – grounded in relationship, in trust, in time.
Eventually the project became inseparable from Durgun’s exploration of identity and served as his own coming-out narrative.
"Trans people inspire so many artists; I admire their bravery and self-definition. Very quickly I realised the project was as much about me as it was about them – if not more."
In a world that so often frames queer life as either spectacle or exoticism, his work offers a radically simple alternative: presence.
CREDITS
The exhibition was curated by Marie-Luise Mayer, Exhibitions Manager at Fotografiska Berlin, in close collaboration with the artist, in partnership with IFA Berlin and produced in friendly cooperation with our photography print partner WhiteWall.
