The first time I remember seeing the work was as a carousel of fruits and vegetables being chopped at food markets around the world. A hand holding a stack of cactus leaves waited while the other sliced quickly at the stack, a bunch of palitos tumbling into a bowl. A man was using a thick, aggressively sharp-looking knife to carve a precise spiralling shape into the flesh of a pineapple. Another man removed the rind of a watermelon, cigarette dangling from his mouth all the while.
The videos were simple and transfixing. The chopping techniques had evidently become second nature, so practised that they seemed totally casual. The vegetables were unfamiliar, which added to the intrigue. I was hooked. I was convinced enough, by these ten short clips of vegetables being chopped, that I urgently needed more. I clicked through to the profile, hit follow.
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At a surface level, the appeal of this kind of work is obvious in the context of the internet. It\u2019s \u201Coddly satisfying\u201D, it\u2019s ASMR, it\u2019s #wanderlust, but it\u2019s also #relatable. Perhaps for these reasons, photographic artist Sam Youkilis has amassed a huge following, and inspires an unusual level of devotion (a comment on one of his posts from December: \u201CLooking at the world through your eyes is the greatest gift I have received. Thank you\u201D). When I look to see what Instagram accounts we have in common, it\u2019s not only photography friends who follow him, but the friends who don\u2019t care about art at all.
Youkilis\u2019s work uses the casual language of the cameraphone, the one with which we are all \u2014 photographers and non-photographers \u2014 familiar. This, too, part of his appeal; that there\u2019s no barrier for entry, that his style is not abstruse or overadorned or withholding. Though he has a playful, artful eye for visual gimmicks like mirrors, reflections, and frames, his subject matter is the familiar stuff of Instagram, namely travel, leisure, and hospitality. People having fun, people in love, people passing time pleasantly. We watch gruff Neapolitan men playing dominoes and tarocchini, couples kissing on the sidewalk and the beach.
He posts to the grid, but there\u2019s vastly more to be found in his stories, which have the special appeal of the ephemeral. We accompany him through fireside dinners in Umbria and bustling Mexico City markets, watertaxis in Venice, vineyards in the south of France. Yet as stunning as some of the places he finds himself are, though, his work isn\u2019t dependent on exotic contexts. Locked down in New York in 2020, he posted videos of his own baking, soundtracked by the radio in his apartment (\u201C\u2026so the key thing that this virus has taught us, is that the time between when you act and when you see the result of those actions is 2-3 weeks\u2026\u201D); his mom doing home workouts; his empty block. A few weeks later, when restrictions had started lifting a little, friends come to his window, masked, and he pours wine for them, or lowers a basket down filled with desserts (\u00E0 la the Neapolitan women he documented in Naples); and then he\u2019s out and about again himself, recording the uncanny sight of a man doing Tai Chi, gloved and masked; or the couples that found ways to love each other through PPE. As time passed and restrictions relaxed, he documented suited waiters carrying hand sanitiser to restaurant tables as though they were were under silver cloches.
Youkilis\u2019s work seems to spring from an attitude, a way of being, rather than a particular context in space. It\u2019s as warm and dynamic in the city as in the countryside, on the beach as in the jungle, in the sun as in the rain, during a pandemic as during a holiday, whatever \u2014 and this is one of the reasons I feel that his work accesses something deeper and more profound than just being fun and clickable. While in some ways it\u2019s easy to understand the success of his work on a platform like Instagram, I notice just as many ways that his work doesn\u2019t play by the usual rules of online engagement. Many of his videos feel like studies of the kinds of things and people that often go undocumented by photographers: the person who\u2019s not especially photogenic, who perhaps just looks \u2014 well, normal. Or, conversely, it\u2019s the subject matter that the serious photographer usually avoids as clich\u00E9: the street busker, the sunset, the perfect cappuccino.
While I was working on this newsletter, I was re-reading Jenny Odell\u2019s How To Do Nothing, which isn\u2019t exactly a self-help book in the way that the title might suggest. Odell describes the effects of the attention economy, and ways that we might train ourselves to resist it. She draws persuasive links between our attention and our will: if we have no control over our attention, our control over our desires \u2014 including the desire to live in a certain way \u2014 is equally corrupted. She examines the work of various philosophers and artists whose work has, some way or other, refused the terms of the corrosive status quo. One of these artists is David Hockney, and his \u201Cjoiners\u201D \u2014 collages of photographs used to distend and transform the environment they depict \u2014 such as Pearblossom Highway and The Scrabble Game, and his video installation, Seven Yorkshire Landscapes, in which a grid of monitors displayed the view of eighteen different cameras which were fixed to Hockney\u2019s car as he drove slowly down a lane in Yorkshire. In these works, Hockney was using photographs and video in a way that he believed was closer to the way that we look, just as Cubism aimed to do with painting; at the same time, displaying these partial and conjoined records of a scene made the usually smooth way we join our broken-up looking seem disjointed and strange, requiring us to look consciously and deliberately. Visitors to the show, writes Odell, went on to pay attention differently: \u201CHockney\u2019s piece had train them to look in a certain way\u2014a notably slow, broken-up luxuriating in textures.\u201D
\u201CSuch an offering,\u201D she continues, \u201Cassumes that the familiar and proximate environment is as deserving of this attention, if not more, than those hallowed objects we view in a museum.\u201D I feel that Youkilis is doing something similar. His work invites us to pay closer attention to the ordinary, both on- and offline. In encouraging us to spend a while looking at these apparently random passers-by, he encourages us not only to pay a different kind of attention to his Instagram feed, but also to our own lives.
His work certainly reflects a broader movement towards video on Instagram, one that\u2019s been heavy-handedly pushed by the platform itself. Over the last few years, I\u2019ve noticed more and more photographer friends and colleagues beginning to post short videos to their stories. Little, incidental moments whose motion is part of their charm: light dappling onto a wall in the summer, moving as the trees move; the view from a train window. A photograph wouldn\u2019t suffice, because the texture of this movement is the thing being communicated.
There is a difference, I note, between Youkilis and the way that video is often used by photographers. In the latter group, there\u2019s a coyness, a sense at times that a video is being used to vaguely dangle the photographer\u2019s presence somewhere exciting, a sense that this is BTS (with the real content being produced offscreen), a gesture towards the life of the photographer whilst concealing all the fine details; it\u2019s artful, discreet. Youkilis himself, by contrast, is decisively present in his work: we often see his hands, holding an ice cream or an oozing sandwich. This presence is important \u2014 he\u2019s the avatar through which we enjoy these meals, this conviviality. Self-effacement just wouldn\u2019t work: it\u2019s as if these videos, so concerned with pleasure and the texture of things, require a human presence in order to drive home their sensuousness. Sometimes we hear his voice speaking to the people he\u2019s filming; that\u2019s another thing, the presence of sound, the messiness of which is usually coyly removed from other photographers\u2019 artful B-roll.
I think this messiness is part of the reason why the work is special. Instagram is very good at algorithmic smoothing. The internet likes to be a clean, well-lit space, just as our cities and public spaces increasingly tend towards the minimalistic; the inoffensive; smoothed corners, blond wood. This is, of course, in contrast to the realities of being human, and the world more generally \u2014 a reaction against it, an attempt to hold different kinds of chaos in check. Odell again:
How to Do Nothing explores the ways that the human experience is vague and strange and inassimilable. In a similar way, Youkilis\u2019s work offers more friction than the usually legible matter of Instagram\u2019s most widely-circulated work.
First of all, the work requires patience: we are invited to watch normal people doing normal things for 15 seconds or more. It asks us for our time. This is no small thing, because Youkilis\u2019s videos don\u2019t tend to have any narrative arc or particular payoff. Often their duration \u2014 without satisfying denouement or \u201Cwait for it\u2026\u201D tension \u2014 is exactly the point. In one video, we watch a middle-aged couple position and reposition themselves for a selfie. The man is frustrated, first at not being able to get the angle, then at his partner\u2019s interventions, the way she points at how he might use his phone differently. He bats her away, then relents. They cluster round the phone together, adjusting settings. Composition finally arranged, the couple adopt smiles, which bloom and wither and bloom again as more annoyances surface and are solved. The scene is completely familiar, though we might not usually permit ourselves the time, nor have the boldness, to observe for so long. We are watching for the pleasure of watching, and we trust Youkilis as the steward of our attention, pointing us towards normal life as it unfolds. 152ee80cbc
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