Sam Youkilis

With great attention to detail, light, and rich colors, Sam Youkilis captures the longings and promises of travel as well as the beauty of the everyday. In addition to his celebrated commissioned work in commercial fashion photography, the photographer and filmmaker, who was born in New York in 1993, uses his professional travels as an opportunity to document human gestures, emotions, and interactions, as well as long-established crafts and local traditions in short films and video portraits. As a pioneer of a new form of visual storytelling, Youkilis works with the iPhone and uses the social network Instagram as a platform to share his observations, compiled into thematic clusters, with numerous followers. From seemingly banal scenes, he creates a visual archive at the intersection of street, travel, food, and documentary photography that serves both the familiar tropes and clichés of travel and references universal themes of human experience. The presentation at C/O Berlin is Sam Youkilis’s first institutional solo exhibition.