With his new book, Somewhere, the Instagram photographer Sam Youkilis turns his lens offline.
Sam Youkilis
In an era where every rando on social media fancies themselves as an amateur documentarian, Sam Youkilis has risen to become the reigning prince of iPhone photography. He has amassed more than half a million Instagram followers thanks to his ability to capture the global human condition through his camera phone’s lens, documenting everything from elderly men playing chess in a pool in Budapest to a pet pig crossing the street in Mexico City to images of couples making out in various cities across the map.
The BBC has dubbed him “the Instagram sensation changing how we see the world.” Interview magazine has praised “his discreetly observant eye for quiet and often humorous moments of humanity.” His naturalistic snaps and 10- to 15-second clips are now sought after by fashion brands like Versace and Vivienne Westwood.
Ivana in Napol and Lake Brienz, Switzerland
Born in New York, Youkilis, 30, studied under the groundbreaking American photographer Stephen Shore at Bard College before leaving the States to live between Italy and Mexico. His first print retrospective, Somewhere, published by Loose Joints last year, is over 500 pages of iPhone works made from 2017 to 2023, delivered in a pocket- sized package. “The book is tiny, between the size of a postcard and an iPhone,” he tells me from Umbria, where he now lives.
Described as a “typology of human experience” and an “immediate and generous indexing of everyday life,” Somewhere forgoes the filtered postcard perfection of most Instagram fluff for cheeky and cerebral snapshots that blur the lines between people and pixels, photojournalism and art, travelogue and creator content, fleeting youth and timeless traditions.
Szechenyi Baths and November in Barcelona
Designed to mirror the in-real-time, in-real-life format of Instagram Stories, Somewhere kicks off with pages featuring sunrises over the aquatic gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City and wraps up with images shot at dusk, including of a cat at sunset in Essaouira, Morocco. Youkilis painstakingly combed through old clips to select frames to include in the book. Metadata stored in his phone’s photo library helped curate themes around time of day (“7.07 a.m.” or “12.33 p.m.”), color (one diptych shows a woman’s fire-truck-red swimsuit next to the ruddy complexion of a Mediterranean holidaymaker), and human behavior (“gestures of romance”). “Sometimes it’s like I can see the images in the book as though they’re moving, even though they’re stills,” he says. “I know which frames aren’t there.”
In the conversation below, Youkilis discusses the elasticity of iPhone videography, shooting neighborhood cheesemongers, and staying unbothered by American peanut galleries online.
Summer in Marseille I and Breakfast at Cipriani
Alex Hawgood: The iPhone is the world’s lens now. We all use it. It’s pedestrian. But in your hands camera-phone photography feels fresh and unexpected.
Sam Youkilis: Almost everything I shoot is with a phone. It’s the primary tool I use for all of my work. I don’t have any formal training in filmmaking or anything along those lines— not that you need it. The book is all from videos I’ve made on many generations of iPhones over the past six years. My work is thematic and about building meaning through repetition. I often serially photograph the view out of my bedroom window, or the way older Italian men will walk with their hands behind their backs. My videos are almost always single-cut and done in a single take. One thing I’m drawn to is the tension between video and photography. This tension around not knowing if an image is moving or not until you hear a sound or see a slight movement.
AH: In many ways the clips you post on Instagram Stories capture a feeling of stillness better than your still images.
SY: Completely. A lot of the portraiture I shoot is very much me asking someone to stay still. I tell them, “I’m going to take a video or picture but take it very slow.” For me it’s about testing attention spans and seeing how uncomfortable… well, not uncomfortable, per se, because my work is so much about making people feel comfortable. But I think it’s very not human to try to stay as still as possible. Yet something beautiful happens from this type of uncomfortability, forcing yourself to not move and trying not to blink. Video approximates real life, obviously, in a way that still images cannot. You have sounds. You have visuals. You can feel breathing and life. A very uncanny result of video is that it feels way more human than the picture does.
Mica in Havana and Summer in Marseille II
AH: Your Instagram feed functions as an archive of small moments around the world, whether it’s two punkish lovebirds at an amusement park or a street vendor slicing a grapefruit in Mexico. There’s a big contrast compared with the attention-grabbing antics of most popular creators.
SY: I was shooting a project for The New Yorker a couple of years ago where they had me document food-related things happening around my house in Umbria for their annual food issue. One of the stories that we did was this guy who makes mozzarella about 10 minutes from me. He has giant hands— some of the biggest hands I’ve ever seen. He makes mozzarella from scratch once a week, every Wednesday—and it’s very good. The curds are thrown into a wooden bucket, followed by boiling water and salt, and then stretched into mozzarella with a wooden paddle. Like with many men of a certain age, his hands and forearms are covered in hair. For me this process is one of the most beautiful things to watch. I’ve never even noticed or thought of the hair. When the photos were published, the comments were so aggressive about how “disgusting” it is that this man has hair on his hands and how the hair could end up in the cheese. I noticed that the comments were coming mostly from Americans, who I think are so used to all of these processes being industrialized. There is a huge disconnect between what they consume and the artisans, the actual makers of these crafts.
AH: Deciding which real moments from people’s lives you feel comfortable putting in front of a large Instagram audience is a tightrope walk, I imagine.
SY: Since my work revolves around me traveling and being an outsider, I’m sensitive to figuring out ways to tell stories honestly and being thoughtful about the representation of cultures that are not my own. But these images should also ask questions. What does it mean to show things as they are? How can I tell stories in an objective, or somewhat objective, way and not be reductive? How can I make sure not to frame something in a way that’s deceptive? It’s imperative that documentary photography shares things as if they’re happening in front of you.
Photographer SAM YOUKILIS
Text ALEX HAWGOOD
Instagram: @samyoukilis
