Sam Youkilis, Somewhere 2017-2023, 2024

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

Over the past six years, Sam Youkilis has built a continuous archive of photographic works through his phone. Working instinctively, Youkilis’ short, engaging videos collect universal themes of human experience, using the casual language of the cameraphone to evoke something profound, anthropological, complete and yet incomplete. Youkilis‘ work stems from an attitude, a way of experiencing the world, that contains a depth that goes beyond the casualness with which his images circulate freely.

In Youkilis’ first publication, the depth of this engagement with patterns of human behaviour is archived and dispersed across a range of different themes, divided into chapters that play with the tensions between categorisation and randomness that inform his observational works. Made exclusively from video stills, Somewhere explores Youkilis‘ database in search of images of all kinds, from the time of day – 7:07AM, 12:33PM – to unmade beds, the act of cutting, thresholds, dancing couples and gestures of romance.

Presented as a dense 500-page sequence, Somewhere activates archive and typology as a source of human joy and communion, giving courage to his subjects and revealing the profound essence of different places around the world. Youkilis embraces the real by engaging with both the ephemeral and the sincere, while steeped in reverence for the medium of photography through meticulous engagement with composition, colour, chiaroscuro and framing.