Sam Youkilis – Somewhere 2017-2023

Sam Youkilis's immediate and generous indexing of everyday life spans space and time in his debut monograph—a 528-page typology of human experience.

For six years, Sam Youkilis has been building an ongoing archive of photographic works using his phone. Working instinctively, Youkilis is drawn to universal themes of human experience, using the casual language of the camera to evoke something profound, anthropological, exhaustive, and yet incomplete. Youkilis's work is born from an attitude, a way of experiencing the world, that contains a depth beyond the casual ease with which his images flow freely.

In Youkilis's debut 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. Somewhere scours Youkilis's database for images of everything from the time of day—7:07, 12:33—to unmade beds, the act of cutting, thresholds, dancing couples, and gestures of romance.

Presented as a dense 500-page sequence, Somewhere activates archives and typology as a source of human joy and communion, while emboldening his 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 commitment to composition, color, chiaroscuro, and framing.

Sam Youkilis (born 1993 in New York) is a photographer and documentary filmmaker based in Italy.