Selim Say is a photographer based in Frankfurt am Main.

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Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1971 to Turkish guest workers, his wanderlust and desire to explore developed through long car journeys during summer holidays in and through Turkey. At 16, he toured Europe during school holidays using an Interrail ticket, documenting his travels and encounters.

In the late 1980s, he began mountaineering. Rock and ice climbing became his passion, and with it, his mountain and landscape photography began. Until the late 1990s, equipped with a secondhand Leica, Selim Say photographed alpinists and sport climbers. In 2007, he switched from 35mm analog film to DSLR and intensified his focus on portrait photography. Initially, this involved street and travel journalism, followed by his first campaign shoots in the USA and England.

After temporary residences in Boston, Munich, and London from 2007 to 2010, he initially moved to Frankfurt's Bahnhofsviertel district and worked in Europe and on the West Coast of the USA. Since 2016, he has focused on portrait and lifestyle photography, further refining his style and the look of his images from diverse influences in fashion, travel, and analog photography. 

The term “UNPLUGGED” PHOTOGRAPHY originated in 2019 and describes his style of photography based on the principle of reducing equipment and sets, creating an intimacy between the person being photographed and the photographer without distractions, using daylight as the primary light source, and incorporating the effects of ambient colors.

Besides photography, Selim writes about the quiet spaces between creative work – about change, intuition, questions of style, and the relationship between capturing and understanding images. His texts, published on his blog and in his newsletter, combine literary observation with photographic experience and have long since become an integral part of his artistic language.
His presentation “More” (exclusively for Leica) combines reading and lecture in an unusually intense new format.