A Dialog with Photographer Samuel Laurence Cunnane

 

            Samuel Laurence Cunnane, photograph by Daniel Boisson-Berçu, 2025.

By SELIN TAMTEKIN March twenty ninth, 2026  

When I ask how he’s firstly of our cellphone name, our dialog shortly turns to the climate, because it usually does on this a part of the world. “I’m very well. It’s actually very sunny in Ireland,” Samuel Laurence Cunnane says in his chirpy voice. I inform him it’s a equally vivid day in London — although after weeks of darkish skies and torrential rain, this feels a uncommon exception.    

Cunnane is chatting with me from the home the place he was born and raised, which he describes as “in the middle of nowhere” in County Kerry, on Ireland’s west coast.

“It sounds like a stereotype, but it’s just green fields everywhere. From the window I can see across the valley and the little village I went to school in is just out of sight,” he tells me.

Yet for roughly half of the 12 months, his life is way extra nomadic: he travels for weeks or months at a time, tracing the visible threads that curiosity him and photographing them together with his analogue digicam. After every journey, he returns residence to Kerry, printing all the things by hand in his darkroom. 

“I won’t see any of the work until I come back and develop it. I start with contact sheets, then make work prints, and later larger prints from those. It feels like a kind of distillation process. You go out and see all the possibilities, and in the end you might arrive at maybe twenty-five photographs.”

Recently, Cunnane has been making these solitary journeys in his camper van, which permits him to journey freely, decelerate, and linger so long as he needs. Where he finally ends up is commonly formed by his private life — visiting associates or eager to see sure locations.

He wanders across the outskirts of cities, step by step transferring towards their facilities. 

“From quite early on I preferred to remain slightly apart from things,” he displays. “I remember the feeling as a child of watching from the top of the stairs, hearing everything going on downstairs. I enjoyed that distance.”

        Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Green River, 2019, Hand-printed
C-type print on archival photograph paper, 22.5 x 30.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In Green River, captured throughout one among his walks on the outskirts of Brussels, a putting band of turquoise water cuts via a woodland flooring carpeted with rust-colored leaves. When I ask about his use of the normal analogue course of, Cunnane says the constraints of the medium have all the time suited him. “I’ve never used digital. It’s not that I have any problem with it — I think it’s an incredible technology. But it feels like a slightly different thing altogether. With digital you see the image straight away and end up spending so much time on the computer, as opposed to working this other way.” 

In Blue Road, from which the exhibition on the Hayward takes its title, a freshly laid tarmac street en path to Marseille seems blue within the early night mild.  As in Green River, the title gently disrupts the expectations language locations on what we see, encouraging the viewer to pause and look extra attentively, moderately than counting on preconceptions.    

Cunnane’s London debut brings collectively a rigorously chosen group of works spanning the previous decade, made throughout his travels throughout Europe, the Middle East and components of Asia, although the places themselves are not often identifiable and don’t function factors of reference.  

Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Blue Road, 2023,
Hand-printed C-type print on archival photograph paper, 32×47.5 cm.  Courtesy of the Artist.
 

Cunnane recollects a defining second in his life which led him to develop into a photographer:  

“When I was fourteen, my little brother passed away, and I think after that I was probably a little lost without him. I was terrible at school, and I had no idea what to do. I had no direction. Then one day, a good few months later, I woke up and it just hit me. It’s the strangest thing. I’ve never had that kind of clarity in my life since, but that moment was crystal clear.”

His grandfather gave him his first digicam, a Fujica STX1. From that second on, images turned his calling, and he later went on to review it at college. Over the years, he has labored with a variety of cameras, together with Leica, Pentax SLRs and a Contax G2, a few of which have damaged or been stolen.

When I ask Cunnane how his work has developed through the years, he says:

“At university I was introduced to great photographers and saw things I’d never seen before, which really opens your mind to what’s possible. Over time the work becomes more refined, but the instinct for it doesn’t really change.”

His methodology is neither research- nor topic-based; as a substitute, it unfolds intuitively. He finds himself drawn to sure recurring tropes — a specific mild, a sure temper of intimacy. 

      Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Blue Bowl, 2025, Hand-printed C-type print on archival photograph paper, 19.4×29.5 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

Upon coming into his exhibition on the Hayward, one {photograph} among the many small works on show immediately catches my consideration: a cobalt blue glass bowl resting on its facet in a steel dish rack beside a sink, reflecting a quiet second of home life, marked by a suspended stillness.
On his alternative of working in a smaller format, Cunnane says: “I like the feeling of a world that’s quite contained and condensed, that doesn’t dissipate.” 

I inform Cunnane that in one other work, Petrol Station, the softly illuminated cover and a strip of purple neon glowing alongside its edge remind me of the sense of awe I felt as a baby, drawn to the glow of streetlights and neon at evening.
He says, “There’s something about those lights at night, especially when they reflect off surfaces or the ground. They create a kind of mirror effect, where you begin to lose your sense of what is real — particularly when the ground is wet. A kind of whole new world appears; it’s a dematerialization of things.”

        Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Petrol Station, 2016,

Hand-printed C-type print on archival photograph paper, 10.2×15.2 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
 

In Petrol Station, a close-up of the cover’s entrance, excluding its full construction, reinforces this sense of dematerialization. Reduced to a pointy purple line set between a black void and a white floor, the picture edges in the direction of abstraction. While the title identifies what we’re taking a look at, the {photograph} suggests one other approach of seeing. 

 

     Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Tarpaulin, 2024,

Hand-printed C-type print on archival photograph paper, 19.4×29.5 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

In Tarpaulin, shot at a roadworks website in Berlin within the early morning, the clay-red earth within the foreground, marked by tractor tracks, is mirrored within the folds of plastic sheeting behind, which, I’m informed, is in actual fact black, making a wealthy interaction of texture.
Cunnane doesn’t manipulate his images, so capturing refined shift in mild turns into all of the extra vital. He explains, “It kind of takes on a life of its own in that moment, but it doesn’t last very long. And it’s precisely that fleeting quality that’s so thrilling — you never know when you’re going to come across it.”

Samuel Laurence Cunnane: Blue Road is on view in London at Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space till 3 May, 2026.