Devin yalkin photographs a family home’s last breath and the garden that outlives us
The house in Brigantine, New Jersey, was already slipping away when Devin Oktar Yalkin began to shoot. Within months his mother would list it; within a year the keys would change hands. What he salvaged is not brick or cedar but the hush between objects: a sun-bleached runner, the scalloped lip of a teacup, tomato vines strangling their own stakes. Alone Together (One Last Trip Around the Garden), out now from Zone Books, distills fifty years of family life into 88 monochrome frames that feel like breath on cold glass—there, then gone.
The garden as witness
Every project starts with a hinge moment; Yalkin’s arrived when the coroner wheeled his father’s body past the hydrangeas one final circuit. His mother asked for the detour the way other people request a hymn. No photograph of that walk made the edit—"too raw, too mine"—yet the entire book rotates around it. The garden becomes plaintiff and parish: it grew because two immigrants from Ankara knelt and planted, and it will outlive their children because land forgets more slowly than we do.
Yalkin shot most frames during pandemic lockdowns, but the work refuses pandemic imagery. Instead we get the collateral damage of time: a bureau drawer left ajar, beach sand calcified in a shoe tread, the family dog’s metal bowl oxidized into a lunar crater. Black-and-white is not an aesthetic choice; it is a sieve. Color would lie, promising the eye that today still exists. By stripping hue, Yalkin forces us to feel weight—temporal, emotional, literal—rather than date.
Editing as controlled forgetting
Sequencing took three years and 22 iterations. Early spreads spelled out narrative—here is Dad’s chair, here the divorce-era mattress—until Yalkin and long-time collaborator Ali Burnett started treating memory like a scent trail: let it fade, then let it ambush. They nixed any image that explained too much. A lone shower cap dangling from a faucet stays because it trembles between caretaking and abandonment; a smiling family snapshot at the boardwalk went to the discard pile because it insisted on a single emotion.
Designer Bülent Erkmen wrapped the cover in uncoated stock the color of salt-stained drywall. The title is blind-embossed, readable only when light rakes the letters. You will run your finger across it before you realize you are performing the book’s core act: touching what is no longer there.
Why brigantine matters beyond one family
The Jersey shore town sits on a barrier island one nor’easter away from erasure; flood maps already redraw its outline. Yalkin’s micro-saga therefore doubles as climate prologue. Future buyers will find the same floorboards, but not the garden’s 40-year-old fig that fruits in August. His photographs archive a specificity that rising seas will generalize into loss.
Collectors have already snapped up the first print run—Zone printed 1,500 copies, 300 earmarked for Europe via thezonezine.com and the rest for North America through Yalkin’s site. At $55 it is priced like a trade monograph but behaves like a hand-made relic: pages unsealed so fingerprints scar the margins, turning each reader into co-author of the decay.
The final frame shows a hose curled like a shed snakeskin. No one is left to twist the spigot, yet water will probably spurt next summer for strangers who will never know why the gravel path bends. That is the ache Yalkin wants to press into our palms: houses empty, gardens persist, and memory—softened, fragmented—belongs to whoever bothers to look.