Someone who wasn’t from Philadelphia recently asked me what there is in the city besides Rocky and the Liberty Bell. Being from here, I had plenty of answers, but the question still revealed a familiar pattern. Philly has a bit of a reputation problem. “The city of brotherly love” often feels like a sentiment that stops at the city limits. What reads to me as warm, friendly, and proudly unpolished can register as rough or indistinct to those on the outside. To the uninitiated, the city lacks a clear narrative. Yet Sami Aziz, known to his million-plus Instagram followers as South Street Sam, is working to change that.
Sami has been practicing photography for about twenty years, despite the @southstreetsam account only going live two years ago. We meet at South Street Souvlaki, a warm Greek restaurant in an area considered to be Philadelphia's cultural and creative heart. It is immediately obvious that Sami is not just a regular here. He is family.
His mom used to work in the kitchen. He delivered orders from this very counter while dreaming up the name that would eventually define his project. His dad ran an electronics store on South Street, giving Sami some of his earliest childhood memories in the area. His mother’s family immigrated from Morocco and landed in South Philly. South Street has always been home.
“As long as you’re positive and have a good vibe, people usually return that energy back to you,” Sami says, like it is obvious.
In a social media landscape defined by irony, detachment, and the performance of not caring, that earnestness is almost radical.
His followers do not come for hot takes or controversy. They come because somewhere between the portraits and the punchlines, Sami has figured out how to make a city of six million feel like a neighborhood.
The name itself is borrowed history. Sami’s uncle Sayid spent so much time on South Street that the family started calling him “SS Sayid.” Sayid’s nickname was Sam. When Sami found himself delivering souvlaki on the same blocks, the name felt inevitable.
He bought his first camera around age ten. About to turn thirty-one now, he has been behind a lens for most of his life. After graduating high school in Philly, Sami moved to New York City for college right as Brandon Stanton’s photoblog Humans of New York was taking off. Stanton became Sami’s north star, even inspiring him to photograph his entire freshman class. But what followed was not exactly instant success. He fell into a familiar cycle: “Running out of money, stopping, getting a normal job, saving up, trying again.”
He saved enough to support himself for a year and went forth with a mission: “If I take a prolific amount of photos, I can’t be ignored.” He applied the same discipline he had brought to supermarket shifts and delivery gigs. He shot portraits on South Street every single day for an entire year. No days off. Rain. Snow. It did not matter. His first ten thousand followers were quite literally the people he had photographed.
Somewhere in that first year, Sami noticed Instagram’s algorithm shifting toward short form video. He taught himself to edit, started posting behind the scenes content, and just had fun with it. A completely ordinary video was the first to break through. His following leapt from ten to fifty thousand in a month. Now, over 150,000 portraits later, he has more than a million followers. He has photographed the likes of Kevin Hart, French Montana, and Allen Iverson. He has shot Eagles games. What started as “putting smiles on people’s faces in Philadelphia” has become a portrait of the city the world is paying attention to.
In an internet culture obsessed with overnight success, Sami’s rise is quietly radical. What looks like spontaneity is actually the product of twenty odd years honing a craft, several false starts, and a full year of showing up to the same street every single day.
This was not luck. It was practice.
“Sometimes the moments where you want to do it the least end up being the most rewarding.” He tells me about a Thursday night when he almost did not go out. Late, tired, not feeling it. He pushed through and took a portrait of a woman eating an ice cream cone on the street. She got excited. While they were talking, a guy driving by reversed his car and rolled down the window. “I know you.” Sami turned the whole thing into a video. Five or six million views. Tens of thousands of new followers. He shrugs like it is the most natural thing in the world.
The famous encounters still catch him off guard. He equates the feeling to running track in high school, having to “lock in” before a race. Put the nerves away. Do what he does. Recently, he approached a woman and her mother on the street to ask for a portrait. That woman was Pilot’s editor-in-chief Dagny Tepper. At that exact moment, she was in the middle of telling her mom about this South Street photographer she kept seeing online.
The city has a reputation for grit, for edge, for that underdog energy that resurfaces every Eagles season. Sami’s project offers something else. A quieter truth. In his portraits, strangers soften. Couples lean into one another. New parents beam. Dogs are held like children. The toughness gives way to tenderness. His work becomes proof that Philadelphia really is the city of brotherly love. As he explains, “Philly has my back and wants to see me succeed.”
Some days he is in a flow state from the first portrait to the last. Other days it is a grind. But he sees photography the way a musician sees an instrument. You show up. You practice. You trust the process. And slowly, the art reveals itself.
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SOUTH STREET SAM / @SOUTHSTREETSAM'S RAPID FIRE
Three people, dead or alive, you'd want to portrait: Steve McCurry (he's from Philly), 50 Cent, Muhammad Ali
Favorite Eagle: Jalen Hurts
Weirdest photo experience: A young woman walking an older man on a leash. Already seen it twice before on South Street. Finally captured it. Most viewed video.
Favorite thing about Philly: It's home.
