Somewhere 2017-2023 - For the past six years, Sam Youkilis has been building an ongoing archive of photographic works using his phone. Working instinctively, Youkilis’s short, immersive videos draw together universal themes of human experience, using the casual language of the camcorder to evoke something profound, anthropological, comprehensive, and yet incomplete. Youkilis’ work stems from an attitude, a way of experiencing the world, that contains a depth beyond the casual ease with which his images flow freely.
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\nIn Youkilis’s first publication, the depth of this engagement with patterns of human behavior is archived and dispersed across a diverse range of themes, divided into chapters that play on the tensions between categorization and chance that inform his observational work. Composed exclusively of video images, Somewhere scours Youkilis’s database for images ranging from the time of day—7:07, 12:33—to unmade beds, the act of cutting, thresholds, dancing couples, and gestures of romance.
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\nPresented as a dense 500-page sequence, Somewhere activates archives and typology as a source of human joy and communion, while emboldening its subjects and revealing the deeper essence of different places around the world. Youkilis embraces the real by engaging with both the ephemeral and the sincere, while imbuing himself with a respect for the photographic medium through a meticulous engagement with composition, color, chiaroscuro, and framing.
