Over the last six years, photographer Sam Youkilis has been building a continuous archive of photographic works on his phone. 

Youkilis has long been drawn to universal themes of human experience, working instinctively and using the casual language of the camera phone to evoke something profound, anthropological, comprehensive—and yet incomplete. Youkilis’ work springs from an attitude, a way of experiencing the world, that contains depth beyond the offhand ease in which his images freely circulate.

In Youkilis’s first publication, titled Somewhere, which was published by Loose Joints, the depth of this engagement with human patterns of behavior is archived and scattered across a diverse range of themes, divided into chapters that playfully tease the tensions between categorization and chance that inform his observational works. 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.

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 through a meticulous photographic engagement with composition, color, chiaroscuro and framing.

Somewhere by Sam Youkilis is published by Loose Joints, and can be purchased here.