Selim Say is a photographer based in Frankfurt am Main.

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Born in 1971 in Frankfurt am Main as the son of Turkish migrant workers, he developed a thirst for travel and exploration through his long car trips to and through Turkey during his summer vacations. At the age of 16, he toured Europe on an Interrail ticket during the school vacations, documenting his travels and encounters.

He began mountaineering at the end of the 1980s. Rock and ice tours became his passion and this was also the beginning of mountain and landscape photography. Until the end of the 1990s, equipped with a second-hand Leica, Selim Say photographed alpinists and sport climbers. In 2007, he switched from 35mm analog film to DSLR and intensified his people photography. Initially street and travel journalism, then on his first campaign shoots in the USA and England.

After temporary residences in Boston, Munich and London from 2007-2010, he first moved to Frankfurt's Bahnhofsviertel and worked in Europe and the West Coast of the USA. Focusing on portrait and lifestyle photography since 2016, his style and the look of his images continue to sharpen from various influences from fashion, travel and analog photography. 

The term "UNPLUGGED" PHOTOGRAPHY emerged in 2019 and describes his type of photography based on the principle of reducing equipment and sets, creating an intimacy between the photographed person and photographer without distraction. Daylight as the main light source and the influence of ambient colors.

In addition to photography, Selim writes about the silent spaces in between creative work - about change, intuition, questions of style and the relationship between capturing images and understanding them. His texts, published in his blog and newsletter, combine literary observation with photographic experience and have long since become an integral part of his artistic language.
His lecture "Mehr" (Exclusively for Leica) combines reading and lecture in an unusually intense new format.