In Brigantine, New Jersey, Devin Oktar Yalkin found himself confronted with the impact of a powerful emotion: nostalgia. It was during the lockdown that the photographer returned there for the first time, driven by a need to escape urban confinement and the anxiety it generates. There, in the family house, far from any professional obligations, he rediscovered inspiration. “This still and tranquil environment made me aware of the beauty of daily rituals and the infinite possibilities born from simplicity,” he recalls.
Some time later, however, a move to California limited the frequency of visits to the East Coast. “At first, we would stay there for a full month at the beginning of summer, then return for a few weeks in the fall and winter. Each visit was shorter than the last and felt more precious. When my mother decided to sell the house, at the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, we felt as though our home was slipping through our fingers,” the photographer continues. He then transposed Alone Together onto the pages of “a book with a traditional cut and design, conceived as a sensitive tribute to the notion of ‘home.’”
Mourning a guiding place
On site, photographs become testimonies—traces of a story imprinted on objects, leaving a lasting mark on memory. A constellation on the bare skin of a back, an embrace streaked by the shadow of curtains, a cloudy moonlight followed by an electrifying storm, faces disappearing into the shadow of clothing or the blinding light of a flash, a building swallowed by mist and devoured by flocks of birds… With delicate melancholy, Devin Oktar Yalkin blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction to install his own narrative. Beneath the surface, he subverts expectations: within an omnipresent monochrome, he multiplies nuances, tinting his images with unsettling darkness or dreamlike softness.
A storyteller of intimate history, he applies a palpable emotional charge to ocean landscapes as well as to mundane scenes and everyday gestures. The same emotion that accompanies him as he prepares to mourn a guiding place—one that allowed the family to gather and exist as a chorus. “At the center of the project are my parents and what they created for us. There is this house, which became both a physical structure and an emotional anchor. There is what we leave behind: things, impressions, fragments, and the way we hold on to what once defined us. It is an exploration of transformation and the lingering sensation of loss that remains long after the space itself has disappeared,” the photographer concludes.
Alone Together, published by Zone, is available for pre-order at a price of €55.
