Featured image: Celia looks out the window (2016)
Samuel Laurence Cunnane’s new photography exhibition is currently on display in The Douglas Hyde Gallery. Contemporary in style, Laurence Cunnane’s work is a series of hand-printed colour photographs, intimately framed and presented to the viewer as snapshots of his life. He has previously exhibited all around the world – from the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin to the Theodore:Art gallery in New York City. He very kindly took the time to answer some questions I had about his work.
What photographers are you following, studying or looking at at the moment? How have they inspired your current work?
I’m always revisiting old favourites to see how things change over time, to see what new elements I can decipher in the images. Artists such as Paul Graham, Araki, Saul Leiter and Luigi Ghirri – I’ve been heavily inspired by their works throughout the last few years. However the more I do this, the less I find myself relying on the visual vocabulary of others. I’m developing trust in my own voice by following the elements and atmospheres I want to explore, and sooner rather than later I hope that what I see on the wall is at least close to the imagery I picture in my mind.
You have eschewed not only digital cameras but also digital post-production in favour of hand-printing colour film. How has this decision and this process influenced how you approached creating these photos?
It has very much affected everything I do. The very act of photographing on rolls of film of 36 exposures obviously has an effect, but more so than that, I will often photograph for 4-6 months before seeing a single image developed or scanned. So although there’s a lot of room for error, and I never really know for sure if the work is evolving as it should, I actually find this quite a liberating feeling. I find it’s good to give up control and instead trust the process. There’s no doubt that I’ve missed lots of photographs working in this way but it certainly doesn’t keep me up at night.
Digital photography and digital post production are incredible tools, but I’ve certainly not been the first to feel that analogue and digital are separate mediums with little to do with one another, and that they therefore don’t lend themselves to being compared. I enjoy the analogue workflow because I can’t take too many photographs and because I won’t see them for months. Both mediums, like all tools, have certain constraints. The sooner the tools get out of the way and allow the work to happen, that’s all that counts. It just so happens that the constraints of analogue suit me a lot more than digital.
Can you give a run-down of your technical image-making process, from shooting to processing to printing (for the digitally literate but analoguely illiterate).
The workflow is slow and simple. I generally photograph for at least a couple of months at a time, never taking too many pictures of any one scene. When I’ve gathered enough film or when there’s nothing edible left in my fridge because there’s only room for unprocessed film, I send it away to be developed and I receive in return cut strips of negatives which I then look at in an negative viewer, basically a live feed camera that plugs into a TV monitor. I make a very rough edit of what’s interesting and then continue shooting. Pretty much rinse and repeat until I need to make a final edit of some kind – at which point I travel to a darkroom where I make some final prints. Obviously this is not ideal – it would be better to be making work prints throughout the process – but colour darkrooms are rare and expensive. I usually travel to London or Berlin to use one.
Colour printing is much like black and white printing except for the absence of all light, even the red light we associate so much with darkroom printing. But it’s not as difficult as that may sound, in fact you quickly get used to working in the dark. At the end, you’re left with your final enlargement. The physical connection from the initial scene, where the film was exposed and the light reacted with the chemically coated base of the film, is still present in the final image, where light was once again used to project and enlarge the image onto chemically sensitive paper. This to me seems like an important difference from the digital process which involves a breach of the physical, a digital chasm as such.
How has your approach to image-making evolved since you first started photography?
Well I now have a much more developed sense of what I’m doing and why, whereas when I started I didn’t have a sense at all of what it is I wanted to witness or record, beyond just having an obsession with image making. Now I can picture what the work I’m trying to make might ideally look like. I have a clear idea of the mood I’m trying to convey and the kind of subject matter I want to explore.
What does this body of work mean to you? How do you see it?
This work has been years in the making. it all started with one image I made in France nearly 6 years ago and I’ve added and subtracted to the project throughout the subsequent years. I see the work as an exploration of a feeling about the perceived physical nature of our surroundings and how photography can reflect precisely the ‘weightlessness’ with which the seen world can at times appear, almost translucent and fragmental.
What are your plans going forward? Will you expand on this work or start on another project?
So as ever, I’m still shooting. At the moment, I’m shooting in Kerry a lot (where I’m based) and out west in general. This is basically the beginning of a new body of work. As for the work I’ve created up to now, I hope to complete the final phase of the project by once again traveling to Iran and shooting there for a number of months. Then I’ll begin preparation for an eventual publication of the completed project. At the moment, my main preoccupation is to finish the colour darkroom I’m building down in Kerry!
Samuel Laurence Cunnane’s work is on display in The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin until the 9th of November 2016.
Images courtesy of the artist.
