How subcultures hold Devin Oktar Yalkin’s eye

The first thing to know about the photographer Devin Oktar Yalkin is that he trusts the dark. Not as a landscape, but to use it as a way of reducing a scene to its ‘working parts’. For example: the gestures, the tension of muscles, a certain proximity, the compression of outlines, and the gravity of stillness it can convey. His visual language is high-contrast black and white, with close attention to framing. Faces are pulled close; backgrounds collapse into fields of grain; bodies sit against near-black; light cuts across a wrist or a twisting arm; surfaces are pared back until they suggest more than they show.

It’s all a form of grammar that locates the fundamental, shows emotion, externalizes a fragment of motion. The image holds the residue of something just happened and what is omitted forms a new point of entry, from walks around his garden to underground boxing in Chinatown and from vampire balls in New Orleans to portraits of Tilda Swinton, Daniel Craig, Denzel Washington, and Anne Hathaway – just to name a few.

Born in New York City to Turkish and Armenian parents and now based in Los Angeles, Yalkin has built an incredibly strong practice over the years, right at the seam of reportage and authored image-making. His clients – The New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, A24, NETFLIX, The Atlantic – hire him for that welt, because his pictures read as personal witness and carry an author’s imprint at the same time.

Institutionally, his work entered the Istanbul Modern’s collection following its Close Range exhibition, and in 2022 he had his first Turkish solo show, Obsidian, at Evin Art Gallery in Istanbul. None of this exposure changes the working premise though: Yalkin’s images begin in all quietness and suddenly click toward intensity. There is the moment, and he seems to capture it effortlessly.

Long walks at night taught me how to look, and maybe more importantly: how to feel through the act of seeing.

Learning to feel

When asked about his earliest memory of wanting to ‘make images’ and if there was a moment when he sensed that certain worlds drew him in, the answer Yalkin gives me conveys there was no single conversion moment, no thunderclap. The appetite was built by degrees and the kind of work he began making was naturally guided by both the early and contemporary masters of the photography medium.

Before that, Yalkin moved through another creative rhythm. “I was producing my own music as well as DJing for many years before photography was even an interest,” he says. This already showed him the magic of the late (and early) hours, a space of intuition to which he would return when he picked up a camera. At night, he would wander the streets of New York City, drawn to the quiet and ambiguity that came once the sun had set. “Moving through a world stripped of daylight, I felt an unusual freedom to see without expectation, to follow my instinct, and to photograph whatever drew me in.” Those walks taught Yalkin how to look, and how to feel more fully through the act of seeing.

Watching and drawing inspiration from older black-and-white cinema, Yalkin’s signature easily shaped itself. Movies like Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Seven Samurai, and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull taught him how tension, silence, texture, composition, and time can shape emotion. “Photography can do that with light,” he says.

I reject detachment, the idea of hiding behind the camera. I want the work to feel human, honest, raw, and alive.

The photographic canon, therefore, sits just as near: Daidō Moriyama, William Klein, Roger Ballen, Weegee, Anders Petersen, Nobuyoshi Araki, Josef Koudelka. “They taught me to be fully present and to engage, not observe,” Yalkin says. “A photograph is never just about what’s in the frame, but about the exchange taking place. What I’ve rejected over time is detachment, the idea of hiding behind the camera. I want the work to feel human, honest, raw, alive, and most of all: close.”

Short ledger

• Training: School of Visual Arts (New York).
• Clients: The New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The Atlantic.
• Exhibitions and collections: Close Range at Istanbul Modern, with acquisition into the museum’s collection; Obsidian, first Turkish solo at Evin Art Gallery (Istanbul), 2022.
• Some subjects: Late-night city life, underground scenes, subcultures, TV series sets, wildfire aftermath, editorial portraits across film, music, sports, and culture.
• Influences: Hiroshi Teshigahara, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese; Daidō Moriyama, William Klein, Roger Ballen, Weegee, Anders Petersen, Nobuyoshi Araki, Josef Koudelka.
• Method: Building trust first; move slowly and then work close; keep the pictures human.

The in-between

For his personal series, Yalkin has always been drawn to people and places that exist outside the mainstream, where identity is self-defined and belonging is earned. He thinks this comes from his own background. “Being Turkish-Armenian-American, I’ve often lived between worlds. Subcultures build their own sense of family and ritual within that same in-between space,” he explains. “That becomes a new home for the members.” Whether it’s an unofficial fight night in a closed Dim Sum restaurant underneath the Manhattan Bridge or a Vampire Ball in New Orleans, Yalkin feels these are places where people are unfiltered and fully themselves. Fascinated by how groups form and how rituals grant entry, Yalkin wants to capture that sensitivity.

Among the subcultures he’s documented, the vampire community surprised him the most. “I met Father Sebastiaan while on assignment for The New York Times and was invited to one of his Vampire Balls. I expected something theatrical, with capes and fangs risking clichés, but it turned out to be very intimate. Spiritual, but also deeply human,” Yalkin says. “Beneath the costumes and make-up I witnessed a community built on trust and ritual. They created a space for themselves where fantasy and reality could merge, and being there, this all felt very natural to me.”

I always ask before photographing. That openness turns the act into collaboration rather than intrusion.

The price of admission

Being in these different worlds, building trust is paramount. I asked Yalkin how he gains access to the subculture groups and how he avoids exploitative stances. The answer came down to my thesis: “Trust is everything. It’s the price of admission in subcultural spaces.” The artist makes his presence known and always asks before photographing. “That openness turns the act into collaboration rather than intrusion. I first spend time around without my camera, just being there, so people understand I’m not there to take from them, but just to witness. And when permission comes naturally, the images reflect that honesty.”

On a practical level, this means the photographer moves slowly at first, just watching, listening, talking, learning the rhythm of a place and its people. “Once I understand where I am, I work instinctively. At the Vampire Ball, I shot fast and close, using flash to echo the intensity of the night but only after the initial trust had been established. My goal is always to reflect the emotional truth of the space, otherwise you only shoot the surface.”

So this is where his pictures land: not ornamental, also not neutral, but anchored with its subject to carry a certain charge. The people in it are not turned into types, they resemble their identity. There is a beautiful example of how this collaboration turned out: “The photo of the woman in the white dress in the pool is one that I cherish very much,” Yalkin says. “Together, we discussed the idea of her going in the water and the long garment floating around her. She stayed in there for a long time for me to find the perfect image, with someone else assisting me with the lighting from the 3rd floor of the hotel – since there was not enough light outside.”

The cut that remains

In Yalkin’s current life, having moved from New York to Los Angeles a few years ago has deeply changed him. “Maybe it even disrupted my relationship with people and with connection in general.” In New York, he could step outside and instantly be dragged away in the city’s current. “Human contact is actually unavoidable,” he says. There’s the constant sense of presence and of being woven into something larger. “In Los Angeles though, that kind of immediacy doesn’t really exist. There’s little foot traffic and almost no street life; you have to drive somewhere to find other people gathered in public spaces. But once you have to plan for it, the spontaneity disappears.”

Subcultures do exist in California, but they’re scattered, and to engage with them you have to seek them out deliberately. “It’s a different rhythm here, and it has altered my work.” Now, Yalkin often stays closer to home, photographing a spider’s web, his mother’s garden, his late father, the moon, or the back of his son playing in the sand. The shift hasn’t dulled the pictures, but it has changed the hunt. He still follows the same signs – frictions, habits, personalities, the edges of people and their surroundings – and works toward the same level of close compression. And there’s a different social terrain his field has opened up to, like photographing the wildfire aftermath in his state early 2025.

With everything I do, the work will carry my sensibility.

Within these places and themes, Yalkin’s signature remains austere: minimal scenes pushed to where form and feeling lock. “After many years of making photographs, I’ve come to rely on intuition more than anything else,” he says. “Each image begins with a quiet pull toward something that moves me. I’m not interested in adjusting it to meet the expectations of others. What matters most is that the image feels alive and emotionally real to me.” That discipline is why the subcultural work doesn’t drift into costume and why the celebrity portraits read like people rather than roles. Because, like he said earlier: “A photograph is never just about what’s in the frame. It’s about the exchange taking place.” That exchange is the point. And his pictures show it.

New publication

Yalkin’s latest monograph, Alone Together (One Last Trip Around the Garden) consists of works reflecting on the passing of a home and the sense of longing that follows. Set in his old family house in Brigantine, New Jersey, the book unfolds through a series of monochrome images that trace the remnants of a life once lived there. The book can be ordered here.

Devin Oktar Yalkin and the book will also be at POLYCOPIES in Paris during Paris Photo (the book fair) from November 12th to the 17th.

Representation: EVIN Art Gallery