Sam Youkilis – Somewhere 2017-2023, Loose Joints, 2023
Sam Youkilis’s immediate and generous indexing of everyday life reaches across space and time in his debut monograph – a 528-page typology of human experience.
In Youkilis’s first publication, the depth of this engagement with human patterns of behaviour is archived and scattered across a diverse range of themes, divided into chapters that playfully tease the tensions between categorisation and chance that inform his observational works. Made exclusively of video stills, Somewhere scours Youkilis’s database for images of everything from the time of day–7:07AM, 12:33PM—to unmade beds, the act of cutting, thresholds, dancing couples and gestures of romance.
Sam Youkilis has been building a continuous archive of photographic works through his phone for the last six years. Working instinctively, Youkilis’s short, immersive videos gather universal themes of human experience, using the casual language of the cameraphone to evoke something profound, anthropological, comprehensive and yet incomplete. Youkilis’s work springs from an attitude, a way of experiencing the world, that contains depth beyond the offhand ease in which his images freely circulate.
Presented as a dense 500-page sequence, Somewhere activates the archive and the typology as a source of human joy and communion while emboldening his subjects and unlocking the deep essence of different places worldwide. Youkilis embraces the real by engaging with both ephemerality and sincerity, while steeped in reverence for the photographic medium through a meticulous engagement with composition, colour, chiaroscuro and framing.
Stoppard’s essay for this volume is titled “On Cliché”. It sits alongside essays by David Campany and Jack Self.
Extract
Sometimes I can almost smell the images. The mix of sun-cream and sweet floral perfume that tarnishes a neckful of golden brass jewellery. The salt of the sea, the hot air hitting the back of the throat. The frothing beer. The tomatoes cooking, frying hot. The petrol from a scooter driving by. Seafood. Versace Blue Jeans cologne mixed with sweat on a teenager as he runs, runs, and – up – jumps into the water. A lipstick tube opening, bright red. The smoke from a cigarette burning, just at the edge of shot.
Looking at Sam Youkilis’s photographs, I think of that great Joan Didion line about the sense of promise that comes with heat or travel: the freedom inherent in getting away. ‘Summer is, after all, the season of escape: the landscape in which to contemplate, alone, our failures and our possibilities; the safety valve, the frontier that none of us wants – or can afford – to see closed.’
You could summarise that as ‘summer is faith’. It gives a reason to push on, a reason to have a little conviction in oneself again. One fingers the paper tablecloth, sips the local wine, and feels a swelling buoyancy: maybe there is still time to be young and beautiful and who you wanted to be before life and compromise got in the way. Is there anything that can transport you back to childhood – to looking out on the day full of schemes and courage, sure this was a playground that would persist forever – more reliably than summer? It would take a truly committed depressive to see the bright light through the trees, or the glimmer of the early moon on the surface of the water, the air still warm on your skin, and not feel that salvation may still be possible, that some better self could be conjured yet.
Indeed, the act of travel is an act of fantasy and an act of image-creation, of crafting a version of self that is invented, memorialised, and fed by visual dreaming. One picks a place often because of images – photos in a travel brochure or, today, uploads on Instagram. One sees the place, and then pictures how one will be in it. I will become better, a better self. I will be happy. Free. One begins to fashion additional photos in the mind, adding oneself to the beaches, the cobbled streets. One sees oneself coming out of the sea. One sees oneself holding the ice cream; kissing the handsome, tanned stranger; raising the glass, ice cubes clinking. One books a plane ticket, camera packed, ready to make the pictures one already saw. People are often in the process of enacting that fantasy across Youkilis’s images. They are becoming pictures, becoming the versions of themselves they already imagined as flat.