There’s a certain quiet in Samet Durgun’s photographs. Not the kind that fills awkward silences, but the kind that listens. The kind that waits. The kind you need when words have run out – when the body becomes the last site of testimony.

In “Come Get Your Honey”, currently on view at Fotografiska Berlin, Durgun captures queerness not as performance, but as everyday survival. These are not images of “diversity” in the corporate sense. They are portraits of structural absence: of shelter, of care, of recognition. His protagonists – trans, non-binary, and queer individuals with refugee or asylum-seeking backgrounds – navigate Berlin with the weight of multiple border regimes: legal, social, emotional. They live in a Europe that offers protection on paper, yet filters belonging through performative liberalism. One is expected to be out, visible, and proud – but not too much. Grateful – but not angry. Durgun’s images resist this flattening. Instead of exceptionalism, he shows community. Instead of drama, he gives us tenderness.

Many of the portraits were taken during the COVID-19 lockdown, when private apartments became de facto safe spaces. In one image, a kitchen counter becomes a stage; in another, a pair of hands prepare hair for donation. These quiet scenes are charged — not only with intimacy, but with defiance. A body that softens in front of a camera is a body refusing to be reduced to trauma alone.

In “Defne’s Hands” (2020), Durgun captures not action, but presence: two resting hands on crumpled fabric, softly lit. Rather than dramatizing identity, he renders it as quietly embodied. The folds in the sheet mirror the folds of skin, forming a subtle dialogue between body and material — both shaped by memory. There’s no face, no performance — only hands and light. And in that spareness lies its quiet power.

In “Keil Li at McDonald’s” (2020), the camera catches a moment of composed stillness — uniformed, cigarette in hand, Keil stares beyond the lens with the weariness of someone made to justify her presence too many times. The uniform becomes ironic armor; the chain restaurant a backdrop for both exploitation and resistance.

Still, the politics are never absent. Kylie, one of the central figures in both the book and exhibition, recounts her experience of being denied access to the women’s changing room at McDonald’s in Berlin — despite living as a woman. What followed was not just a legal battle, but a negotiation of dignity and safety. The image of Kylie in her uniform, cigarette in hand, becomes layered: worker, warrior, witness.

Yet as much as Come Get Your Honey is a love letter to community, it’s also shaped by the context in which it now lives — a museum space that, despite its openness, still carries the weight of institutional gatekeeping. What does it mean to see trans refugee lives framed in the aesthetic quiet of a culturally polished exhibition venue in a gentrified part of Berlin when those same lives are often refused housing or medical care just outside its walls?

These questions are not unique to Durgun’s work. They echo broader debates about representation: Who tells the story? Who frames it? Who profits? Come Get Your Honey doesn’t resolve these tensions — it sits with them.

Fotografiska Berlin, as the host, plays a significant role. Its positioning as a socially engaged institution is not without weight. By placing Durgun’s work at the center of its opening program, Fotografiska aligns itself — at least symbolically — with queer and migrant struggles. And yet, symbols are not enough. Institutions must remain accountable, especially when amplifying voices forged in precarity.

Some critics worry about the museumification of queer struggle — the risk that lived trauma becomes aesthetic artifact. Others question whether intimacy and softness can be politically effective. But these critiques, while valid, can also underestimate the power of subtlety. Durgun’s images do not shout — they stay. They linger. And in doing so, they challenge viewers to stay with them.