The Constraints of the Medium Have Always Suited Me: A Conversation with Photographer Samuel Laurence Cunnane

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

By SELIN TAMTEKIN March 30th, 2026  

When I ask how he is at the start of our phone call, our conversation quickly turns to the weather, as it often does in this part of the world. “I’m very well. It’s actually very sunny in Ireland,” Samuel Laurence Cunnane says in his chirpy voice. I tell him it is a similarly bright day in London — though after weeks of dark skies and torrential rain, this feels a rare exception.    

Cunnane is speaking to me from the house where 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 year, his life is far more nomadic: he travels for weeks or months at a time, tracing the visual threads that interest him and photographing them with his analogue camera. After each journey, he returns home to Kerry, printing everything 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 allows him to travel freely, slow down, and linger as long as he wishes. Where he ends up is often shaped by his personal life — visiting friends or wanting to see certain places.

He wanders around the outskirts of cities, gradually moving toward their centers. 

“From quite early on I preferred to remain slightly apart from things,” he reflects. “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 photo paper, 22.5 x 30.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In Green River, captured during one of his walks on the outskirts of Brussels, a striking band of turquoise water cuts through a woodland floor carpeted with rust-colored leaves. When I ask about his use of the traditional analogue process, Cunnane says the constraints of the medium have always 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 at the Hayward takes its title, a freshly laid tarmac road en route to Marseille appears blue in the early evening light.  As in Green River, the title gently disrupts the expectations language places on what we see, encouraging the viewer to pause and look more attentively, rather than relying on preconceptions.    

Cunnane’s London debut brings together a carefully selected group of works spanning the past decade, made during his travels across Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia, though the locations themselves are rarely identifiable and do not serve as points of reference.  

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

Cunnane recalls a defining moment in his life which led him to become 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 camera, a Fujica STX1. From that moment on, photography became his calling, and he later went on to study it at university. Over the years, he has worked with a range of cameras, including Leica, Pentax SLRs and a Contax G2, some of which have broken or been stolen.

When I ask Cunnane how his work has evolved over 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 method is neither research- nor topic-based; instead, it unfolds intuitively. He finds himself drawn to certain recurring tropes — a particular light, a certain mood of intimacy. 

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

Upon entering his exhibition at the Hayward, one photograph among the small works on display instantly catches my attention: a cobalt blue glass bowl resting on its side in a metal dish rack beside a sink, reflecting a quiet moment of domestic life, marked by a suspended stillness.
On his choice 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 tell Cunnane that in another work, Petrol Station, the softly illuminated canopy and a strip of red neon glowing along its edge remind me of the sense of awe I felt as a child, drawn to the glow of streetlights and neon at night.
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 photo paper, 10.2×15.2 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
 

In Petrol Station, a close-up of the canopy’s front, excluding its full structure, reinforces this sense of dematerialization. Reduced to a sharp red line set between a black void and a white surface, the image edges towards abstraction. While the title identifies what we are looking at, the photograph suggests another way of seeing. 

     Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Tarpaulin, 2024,

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

In Tarpaulin, shot at a roadworks site in Berlin in the early morning, the clay-red earth in the foreground, marked by tractor tracks, is reflected in the folds of plastic sheeting behind, which, I’m told, is in fact black, creating a rich interplay of texture.
Cunnane doesn’t manipulate his photographs, so capturing subtle shift in light becomes all the more significant. 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 until 3 May, 2026.