What remains of the places we once inhabited? And how do they shape us and our memory? Alone Together (One Last Trip Around the Garden) by Devin Oktar Yalkin, published by Zone, traces an answer to these haunting questions with dreamlike, sweet images. Set in the family house in Brigantine, New Jersey, Yalkin’s book is a collectsion of black and white photographs that capture domestic spaces and what remains of the life once lived there. Yalkin’s images give form to memory, transporting us into a twirling state of contemplation. While permeated by melancholy, they also never fall into sadness – moments of delicacy and light introspection.
Through time, we shape spaces into extensions of our souls, but Yalkin reminds us that our relationship with spaces is reciprocal: the places we lived in have memory. With a gaze able to capture the essential, the artist investigates the traces of existence we leave behind and invites us into his quiet exploration of the past, where details hold glimpses of the future.
1. You work in black and white: how did that begin?
Black and white has always felt like the most honest way for me to see. I picked up a camera in 2006, and early on I was drawn to stripping things down rather than adding to them. Color can be seductive, but it can also distract. Removing it allows me to focus on light, gesture, and the emotional weight of a moment.
That connection deepened in the darkroom. I was drawn to the physicality of the process and the solitude it required, watching an image slowly emerge in the developer tray felt almost like memory taking shape. It slowed everything down and made each decision more deliberate.
Over time, black and white became less of a choice and more of a language, one that aligns with how I experience memory, as something softened, fragmented, and shaped by time.
2. How did the theme of the garden emerge in your project?
The garden revealed itself gradually, almost the way memory does. It was a space my parents cultivated for nearly 50 years. Not in a formal sense, but in a way that reflected their lives, attentive, patient, evolving. It grew alongside us. It held mornings, conversations, silences, the passing of seasons. It was never separate from the house, but it carried its own rhythm, its own sense of time.
As our visits became more limited after we moved to California, the experience of being there began to shift. Time felt compressed. We would come for a month in early summer, briefly in the fall, and again during the winter holidays. Each return carried a quiet awareness that things were changing. When my mother decided in late 2023 and early 2024 that she needed to sell the house, the garden took on a different presence. It began to feel like a record of care, something built over decades that could not be transferred or preserved in the same way.
In the work, the garden became both a physical space and a metaphor. It represents what my parents created, something nurtured over time, shaped by repetition and attention, and ultimately subject to loss. It is a living space that continues, even as we move away from it.
The title of the book, One Last Trip Around the Garden, comes from a moment that remains difficult to articulate. After my father passed, when the coroners came, my mother asked them to take him around the garden one last time on the stretcher. It was instinctive, almost ceremonial. A final gesture of love, and a way of acknowledging everything that space had held for them.
I photographed that moment, but I couldn’t include the image in the book. It felt too immediate, too unresolved. Still, that gesture became central to the work. The garden, in that sense, is not only a place, but a threshold, where memory, love, and loss converge.
3. What is your relationship with the past and memory?
This project began as a way of holding onto something that I sensed was already shifting.
The house in Brigantine had been in my family for nearly 50 years. It was my parents’ first home, and over time it became a kind of anchor for all of us. It held birthdays, summers, losses, quiet routines. During the pandemic, it became a place where we could all exist together again, which led to the early stages of this work.
As the possibility of selling the house became real, I found myself drawn to the quieter details. Objects that had always been there. Corners of rooms. Small, almost imperceptible moments that carried a disproportionate emotional weight. These fragments began to stand in for something larger, something that could not be fully described.
I don’t think of memory as something that can be preserved intact. It shifts, it fades, it reconfigures itself over time. What interested me was how the house existed emotionally and psychologically, what it meant to us, and how those meanings persist even after the physical space is gone.
4. How did your editing process unfold? How did you go about selecting the images?
The editing process unfolded slowly, over several years, and required a certain distance from the work.
Although many of the images were made during the early pandemic, I came to understand that the project was not about that period, but about the emotional structure of the home itself. It became a reflection on my parents, on what they built, and on how that space shaped our lives.
I approached the sequencing with restraint. I wanted the book to feel like a quiet unfolding, closer to the way memory accumulates than a fixed narrative. The structure remains fairly traditional, allowing the images to carry the weight of the story without interruption.
A significant part of the process was my ongoing dialogue with Ali. We went back and forth over long stretches of time, refining the sequence, removing images that felt too descriptive, and allowing others to emerge through their placement. That exchange created the necessary distance to see the work more clearly, and to shape it into something cohesive.
The cover was designed by Bülent Erkmen, and through a series of conversations we arrived at something that felt understated and aligned with the tone of the work.
In the end, the book became a meditation on home as both a physical structure and an emotional condition. It considers what we leave behind, objects, impressions, fragments, and how those elements continue to live within us, even after the place itself is no longer ours.
Alone Together (One Last Trip Around the Garden) is on sale at https://www.thezonezine.com/issue/alonetogether/ (European Sales) and https://www.devinyalkin.com/alonetogether (America and beyond).
