Saima Altunkaya

Saima Altunkaya, also known as Akkadia, is an internationally award-winning artist and photographer working between beauty and fashion photography and an independent artistic practice rooted in Paris. While her commercial work operates within the language of image-making and aesthetics, her authorial practice follows a more introspective impulse, driven by solitude, observation, and a sustained engagement with light and impermanence.

Paris functions as both setting and subject in her work. Moving through its streets, gardens, and cemeteries, she approaches the city as a living organism, revealed through transient atmospheres rather than fixed narratives. At the core of her practice lies Père Lachaise cemetery, where she repeatedly explores subtle shifts of light and space. These observations form the basis of several ongoing series, including Sanctuary, Leftovers, and The Hanging Gardens, which examine themes of transience, memory, and cyclical renewal.

Working with long and multiple exposures, she balances deliberate composition with chance, allowing unpredictability to shape her images. Her work meditates on traces of presence and the fragile tension between permanence and decay, with light serving as both material and language...