WHAT'S THE STORY?

The practice of photographer and academic Selim Süme approaches photography not as an answer, but as a question. His relationship to the image follows a circular movement: from subjective documentary to the problematics of representation, and back again to the starting point. In this journey, the ordinary and the everyday are not simple images, but surfaces that reveal the fundamental contradictions of life.

SS-Grotesk was designed precisely with this idea in mind. Much like the grotesque typefaces that were once perceived as “strange” but have since become commonplace, Süme’s photographs carry an extraordinary tension within the ordinary. The letterforms, like his images, exist in an ambiguous space between ordinariness and difference, representation and fiction, chance and structure.

SS-Grotesk transforms the everyday function of writing, rendering it once again “strange” and “questionable.” Even though the letters may eventually become ordinary over time, until that moment they remain both ordinary and fresh, both familiar and strange.