There are two aspects of Sam Youkilis work that I find most interesting.
The first is his ability to talk to me in a poetic and sincere way about my country, about my roots, about certain aspects of Italy that I find wonderful and difficult to explain in words. He does it as if the roots he talks about were his own.
The second thing is that in his videos I can also see the contradictions, the complexity and the surreality that are part of the reality he tells, but always with benevolence. His gaze, which lingers persistently on something that captures his attention and enchants him, is like that of a child who is amazed by something he has never seen before.
In his videos I find a kind of magical enhancement of reality. I feel a great tenderness that makes me want to love more, to experience more, to see more.
I joined the photographer and filmmaker based between New York and Italy on the occasion of the release of his first photo book entitled Somewhere, published by Loose Joints, to discuss the editorial project together.
How did you become interested in photography?
I started taking pictures quite naturally when I was 15/16. I was gifted a 35mm SLR camera and took it with me everywhere I went. I photographed my family, my friends, and the city around me.
When did you start making short videos and sharing them on Instagram?
It started kind of by accident when Instagram introduced the story feature (or maybe I just started to use it). I was careful about anything I posted to my grid but decided since stories have a lifespan of 24 hours, I could share more free-form diaristic observations. In this space, I started to make videos and mix them with my stills.
Who are the protagonists of your videos? How do you choose them? How do you approach them while photographing them?
It’s a combination: strangers, friends, people who I’ve gotten to know over time but always people or things I’m responding to in a very organic and instinctive way — I don’t go out seeking criteria or qualities in the people I photograph. People are an important part of my work but really by virtue of where I spend time and what is around me. My home is in the countryside of Umbria — a rural, rustic and sometimes lonely place where there are occasionally people In my photography but the majority of what i photograph and share are the landscapes around me.
How would you describe your relationship with Italy?
I’ve been lucky to have been coming here for most of my life. My parents met and fell in love in Italy and were also married here. They bought land in a tiny village in Umbria in the 80s. I’ve recently bought my own house nearby and have settled here for the time being. I’m learning the language, building a community in Italy and feel energized to work in a place that is feeling like home—albeit not the place I was born in.
The way you show food in your videos is lustful: it really makes you want to touch and taste it. It reminds me of Marco Ferreri s film ‘The Big Feast’. You also give a lot of importance to the care of certain preparations, traditions and gestures in the culinary sphere. What is your relationship with food?
I need to see this film and will actually watch it tonight. I show things—or try to show things as I see them. I’ve always been drawn to food, I travel for food, it’s my favorite insight into cultures and places I don’t know. It’s a medium through which I can express curiosity and interest even when I don’t speak the language. Ultimately, it’s the vehicle for conviviality with strangers, loved ones, or new friends in any culture around the world. Growing up in the US I think we lack this connection between the animal, ingredient, the way it’s processed and turned into food and the things that we eat. I think traveling to eat and learning the importance of ingredients, processes, techniques — some still commonplace others fading with industrialisation has made every part of the preparations and traditions of food-ways more captivating to me. This is a bit more basic and literal but I also think storytelling in my work is very important and if I can help people see the care time and detail in how something is made, it becomes easier to appreciate and also helps justify the value ascribed to these things.
Do you listen/read to contemporary Italian artists of your generation? Or do you prefer to look to the past? Where do you find the inspiration for your videos?
Both. It’s an interesting dance but my work has to be informed by the film and photo work that has come before me but a huge amount of my practice is also looking to my contemporaries and seeing everything happening around me. I think in terms of sensibilities, a way of seeing and visual language I relate more to work made in previous generations but because so much of my job is making work for contemporary commercial clients, it’s fundamental to my practice to know about all of the work happening around me as well. The way I consume the two is different though, by the nature of where the work lives. When looking to the past, I have to scour Criterion, Mubi, or other film archives to see the films I’m curious about or spend hours in a photobook shop or library to see things I haven’t seen. To consume a lot of the artists of the present, they appear amidst restaurants, news sources and magazines in the feed of my instagram and are accessible by scrolling through an app at any time of day.
Do you feel a special connection to the South?
I love the south. I love the north too but I’m an open person, want to talk to strangers, meet people and my work is also indirectly the result of this. It’s way easier to do this in the south where you are met with hospitality and warmth then a defensiveness I’ve found approaching strangers in the north. I mention this often but I connect with people who have warmer weather year round, who live by the sea — of course there are places in Liguria but it’s really cities like Bari, Napoli, Barcelona and Marseille where you find people lying in the beach up to November, eating outside, and following the rhythm of the sun and water.
Some people have talked about the "fetishisation of the Mediterranean", referring to the aesthetic of videos and photographs similar to yours. What do you think about this? What are the driving forces behind your work?
I get it and I think the image of the Mediterranean shouldn’t just be pictures of spaghetti al pomodoro on top of a ledge in the Amalfi coast overlooking an endless expanse of blue sky and water, abundance of lemons, etc. It’s a complicated thing because Italy and the Italian South has had such a heavy hand in their own marketing and they are selling hotels, boat tours, promoting regions internally with this same imagery. So many image makers from the Italian south, who I think have a responsibility and hand in the representation of their own cultures are often the ones perpetuating this exact type of imagery. I’m not exempt and as someone not from the Italian south, I am definitely listening to this feedback and incorporating it into my practice. I also feel a responsibility to show the breadth of culture around the mediterranean if I want to set a lot of my work there but the scope, settings and subject of my broader practice go way outside of and beyond the mediterranean. In this specific case though, the imagery is not meant to be negative or judgmental and I think this is often an opinion imposed by people who are longing for another narrative but haven’t quite figured out what that should be.
There are recurring themes in your short narratives, such as love, a sense of belonging to a place, craftsmanship, the connection with nature. What aspects of reality are you interested in emphasising and why?
You’re spot on with these themes — I think as an outsider, I am drawn to this synergy or connectivity of a person to place, a person to craft, to nature. It also seems like these are the things most idiosyncratic and important to document and preserve in these places. All of the reality I see around me is important.. more than anything else I want to try to find things that are overlooked, happening in real time and these are the majority of my observations.
You are famous for your videos and now you are publishing a book of photographic stills. Why did you feel the need to publish a book? How did the Somewhere project come about?
I want to expand what I do. I don’t like the idea of thinking of my work is purely “content” tailor-made for instagram. It’s really important that the work lives outside of instagram and is put into something more durational, that can disseminate in a different way and has a tactility to it. It also changes contexts immediately from something to be consumed online to printed matter that will live in art book shops and ideally in people’s homes. I think that my videos are what I do best and to try to translate this energy, movement and life into a book was a hard experiment. Lewis and Sarah from Loose Joints and I have been talking for a while about making a book together and I actually never thought it would be possible to turn the videos into something printed but we tested it and it worked quite well. They developed and help me structure the parameters for the concept and I trust them and their work so much that we just went for it.
The book is divided into thematic chapters that reveal your penchant for seriality. What drives you to frame the same themes countless times? Is it an obsessive approach?
I’m definitely obsessive in my approach. I’m also a collector of everything and this extends to my image making process. I end up taking the same image over and over again on different visits and am shocked often by the consistency of my framing. It’s a bit about building meaning through time and repetition but also seeing the world change, the seasons change and the weather change—and the world as well. My work and the repetition in these chapters is also an attempt to show how uniquely similar we are across borders, regions and cultures.
How did you choose the title Somewhere?
My work is so often travel and location based and the book comprises almost 50 chapters of imagery made all over the world. I wanted to choose a title that reflects this ambiguity of place and a lack of specificity. My work is also a result of being deeply curious, looking and a never ending search and this seemed like a title that would echo this process.
Time to take stock: you have just turned 30 and are about to publish your first book. How do you feel now? When you were a child, what did you dream of for your future?
The idea of the book is that it is a selection from my archive but not exhausting my archive. These are themes that will continue in my work and this is related to these six years of time but I plan to build on all of this. I feel great, proud, it was a huge amount of my work and I’m grateful to work with the best publishers who I’m also lucky to call dear friends. It’s a huge step for me to stop safeguarding work, to not be precious about my images and not worry so much about the perfection of colour etc. and release this into the world.
It’s a good question but I don’t really know. Memory is funny and I think my ambitions changed a lot and I don’t even know exactly what I want to do now. I want to show my work in a gallery space, I want to make films and I want to continue traveling and making work like this and stay inspired.
