SAMET DURGUN
“I started doing makeup once I needed to cover a bruise after my father beat me [laughs]. My mom gave me her concealer.” – Kylie Divon
Image gallery
Gabo Gazing, 2020, from the series Come Get Your Honey, 2021
Night View, 2020, from the series Come Get Your Honey, 2021
Artist Portrait_Samet_Durgun
Hair To Donate, 2020, from the series Come Get Your Honey, 2021
Prince Emrah With Headpiece, 2020, from the series Come Get Your Honey, 2021
In Come Get Your Honey – on view at Fotografiska Berlin from July 16 to September 15, 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.
One guiding principle that shapes Durgun’s photographic practice is his belief that photography relies as much on listening as it does on pressing the shutter.
Unlike so-called “parachute journalism,” where someone drops in, delivers a prepackaged story, and then disappears, Durgun takes a different approach – especially in Come Get Your Honey. He isn’t merely interested in looking; he wants to foster mutual learning and let that shared understanding inform everything he creates.
His motifs vary widely. Sometimes the viewer sees small moments of tenderness – seemingly casual touches, everyday situations. Other images capture glamour, pride, self-confidence, and resilience. Still others depict the protagonists’ surroundings, show how their identities shift between visibility and invisibility, finding new spaces in Berlin that transcend normative expectations.
For Durgun, creating the project became inseparable from his exploration of identity “We met in the spirit of ‘I’m here to be myself,’ not merely ‘I’m escaping a crisis,’ even though everybody was indeed fleeing,” he says. In hindsight, Come Get Your Honey also served as his own coming-out narrative. “Trans people inspire so many artists; I admire their bravery and self-definition. Very quickly I realized the project was as much about me as it was about them – if not more.”
Durgun photographed nearly fifty people altogether, roughly fifteen portraits made it into the final series, and not all of the portrayed individuals are identifiable in the images. While some displayed unexpected courage in showing their faces, others chose anonymity, still hiding from family members.
Come Get Your Honey shows lives full of beauty, creativity, and resilience, while also acknowledging the structural barriers and social marginalization these individuals continue to face, even in spaces considered free. At the same time, it can be read as a delicate mosaic—of biographies, encounters, glances or as a quiet manifesto for a different way of seeing: one grounded in relationship, in trust, in time. In a world that so often frames queer life as either spectacle or exoticism, Durgun’s work offers a radically simple alternative: presence. It may sound almost banal, but in the context of contemporary photography, it’s surprisingly rare.
Far from sensationalizing, this body of work listens. It listens to silence, to vulnerability, to the human need for connection – even, and especially, in spaces where it seems most unlikely.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Samet Durgun, born in Adana, Turkey, is a self-taught photographer who has lived in Berlin since 2013. He studied at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, from 2020 to 2021, he participated in the Common Ground mentorship program at UdK Berlin, which supports prospective fine art students that are people at risk. Come Get Your Honey was published as a book by Kehrer Verlag in 2021 and has been featured across various media such as Der Greif, HUCK, i-D Italy, LFI by Leica, and GQ Magazine.Fotografiska Museum Berlin
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