SAMUEL LAURENCE CUNNANE
The Douglas Hyde Gallery
Introduction Samuel Laurence Cunnane is an Irish photographer who has described himself as a ‘documentarian’ and whose works are the result of a considered and thoughtful process of active observation. Influenced by cinema, he records quiet and easily overlooked moments of daily life, both at home and on his frequent travels. His subjects are deceptively ordinary and often the setting is layered or partially obscured. In this way, he reframes the familiar into something tinged with a sense of oblique melancholy. Frequently, there is a tension between recognition and obstruction that brings to mind the work of the late Luigi Ghirri, and there is often a feeling of a slowly evolving narrative, which reflects some of the photography of Paul Graham, two artists who have shown in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in recent times. His concern for the quality of the print is clear; he speaks of ‘making’ rather than ‘taking’ pictures and uses analogue photographic methods. Modest in size, the works are printed by hand from 35mm film, usually in delicate muted colour.
7
Cunnane’s fascination with the act of looking at the world through half-closed eyes, with sideways glances and from fleeting viewpoints root his imagery in the fragments that make up everyday life. But the curiosity of his gaze highlights moments of intrigue and intimacy within these ordinary scenes. Michael Hill and Rachel McIntyre
Interview between Samuel Laurence Cunnane and Michael Hill and Rachel McIntyre from the Douglas Hyde Gallery, August 2016
DHG: The photographs included in this exhibition were all taken while you were travelling through different countries over recent months. Could you tell us about your journeys and how you came to be in those places? SLC: I started in Budapest in Hungary and, over a few weeks, made my way south through the Balkans - Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria - until I eventually arrived in Istanbul. I stayed there for three months and went on day trips to the south and east. I visited other cities but mostly remained in Istanbul, just walking around all the different neighbourhoods. This is the way I always work. I picked a place in the morning, headed out there and looked for something; it’s never anything specific but I know it when I see it. Then, after three months, my visa ran out and I left for Iran. I arrived in Tehran and stayed in the country for two and a half weeks, doing much the same.
9
As for why I went to those places specifically, that’s obviously a little harder to answer. I’m certainly always interested in going to places that are exotic - not to show them as such, but for quite the opposite reason. I try to strip away features from them that I can use, not focusing on the ‘otherness’ of it all. There are fascinating elements I can find there, but they’re essentially the same things I look for here in Ireland. However, that’s not to say that there isn’t a culture out there that I’m drawn to, something nuanced and complex that can enrich a way of seeing, a way of perceiving the world. I had conversations, especially in Iran, about Western preoccupation with the absolute, and with absolute truth. There is a sense of pluralism there, which I find interesting.
Although the places in which you have recently made photographs are not readily recognisable, they do appear to be outside of Ireland. As you come from a rural area in Kerry, is the experience of being in unfamiliar urban places an important part of your process? I think I’ve always been fascinated with ‘outsideness’ and, by extension, the act of
10
looking in. Although I do live in a rural part of Kerry, I’m interested in how much everything already has the potential of being unfamiliar, as if all it takes is a minor shift in perspective for our most familiar surroundings to become alien or unknown. It really doesn’t matter if I’m in a strange place or at home, I end up seeing with the same veil of separation and photographing in the same way. So travel is not essential but if the work has always had this grander ‘ideal’ of breaking through to some physical presence, travel then becomes a symbolic part of it.
It’s interesting that you’ve mentioned the word ‘veil’. The act of looking in from the outside seems to be a consistent feature in your work and many of your subjects are obscured by light and shadow. There are views through windows or screens, and many other physical obstructions. Are these barriers you actively seek out to communicate your perception of the world, or do you feel that they occur instinctively through your process of looking and photographing? There’s no doubt that I’m almost instinctively drawn to these elements. I’m fascinated with unclear imagery, the kind of work that’s close to a glance or a sidelong look. I think this is a
11
way of representing the obvious ideas of walls, separation, and obscurity, and the idea that the world at this one angle, at this one vantage point will only exist in this moment. There’s something about loading the imagery with physical layers that seems to reinforce this idea for me. Perhaps it’s about when all these elements align in one order, things slot into place for that one fraction of a second, making the world feel more intangible than the reality. It’s as if the camera is not detached enough and has to recede further behind layers of obscurity. For instance, I much prefer the world as it appears through a window, and there are times when I prefer photographs of paintings to the actual paintings.
In your most recent works, the images of people seem to be much more direct and upfront, but there is still a contradiction between intimacy and distance. Do you consider your process of making portraits different from your usual approach to capturing the mood or atmosphere of a place? There are a few strategies going on in this body of work. There’s the kind of imagery that we just
12
discussed that is taken through screens or from a distance, the inanimate and odd banality. They’re paired with atmospheric images, works which are important because they serve as ‘cinematics’ of everyday life. I never wanted to make ‘everyday photography’ because I always found it such a curated and disingenuous depiction of life. I wanted to reflect a feeling of witnessing a theatrical production of our lives, a feeling that there are layers between us and our experiences that are affected by our awareness of how things are portrayed through television and cinema. And then there are the portraits. I always thought an antidote to this cinematic sensibility would be to focus on people, but instead of embracing this opposition I decided to depict people as characters in a narrative, as if nothing escapes from the gaze of the camera. Everything becomes a set piece, everything becomes a prop or a protagonist. Basically, I always want the work to be asking these kind of questions. Of course, someone might ask, if that’s your preoccupation, why not just make large-scale pieces with actors? But that would defeat the purpose; I want the work to have the tropes of being ‘in the real world’ but to reflect our inability to process this reality. We have such a crude way of looking at the world
and we filter out so much. For that reason, things often seem like set pieces we’ve already created.
Touching again on the influence of cinema on your work, many of your photographs actually do seem like scenes from films. Are there any directors in particular whom you admire or who have influenced your way of looking at the world? There are directors I like, such as Wong Kar-wai, Yasujiro Ozu, and Michel Gondry, who create a strong mood within their worlds. Then there are less obvious specific films in which I’ve latched on to the imagery as a template in which to set my narrative. For exmaple, the Turkish film Dry Summer (Metin Erkasan, 1964) has this amazing depiction of a bamboo grove and I’ve definitely used it as an inspiration to set some work I’ve made here in Kerry. And as I’ve already pointed out, the idea of fragmentation is definitely important to me. If you move your eyes from side to side, or blink, your signal momentarily shuts off so you lose sight for a moment. This is something that rings true for me, that our lives are a series of tiny fragments.
That makes sense in terms of what you said earlier about admiring a way of seeing that has an awareness of pluralism – rather than adhering to a certain or definitive view. Yes, I suppose it’s exploring that idea that’s at the heart of the work. I should also say that I wouldn’t be so foolish so as to have too much of a fixed idea about the act of looking. I want the work to evolve, to adjust in time as new elements are introduced in life. Things change, after all.
People have remarked on the connection of your work to that of Luigi Ghirri. Is this an important comparison, or are there any other photographers with whom you feel just as closely aligned? There is no doubt that I’m heavily influenced by Ghirri and by the likes of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Saul Leiter before him. The uncanny, detached, and mysterious atmosphere Ghirri manages to create had a massive influence on me when I saw it first. However, whereas Ghirri is very conceptual, his work being the manifestation of a brilliant mind equipped with an idea which is expressed photographically, my own perspective is different. I’m concerned with
the act of looking, while Ghirri, at least to my mind, seems more concerned with what he has already seen. I’ve undoubtedly borrowed tropes from his work, but I think I’m simply borrowing them to paint a very different picture, one perhaps also defined by a very different time. The issue of influence is complicated and interesting. Hopefully, in being inspired by Ghirri and the other photographers I’ve mentioned, I’ve learnt from their ways of seeing and am becoming a little closer to developing my own vision and vocabulary.
How did you approach the selection of photographs for this exhibition? Are there any key images that help to lead the narrative? There are a lot of different balancing acts at play in any edit. In a gallery space it is difficult to create the cumulative effect that is characteristic of a book, so I’ve had to rely on ‘conversations’ between individual works. When putting together an edit, I don’t have a rigorous method; I just know the work I want to show that best serves to communicate the message or create the space that I have in mind. There are a few key moments that are essential in the mix, moments that
lurch back and forth into both new and familiar territories, and I weave them in with works that are repeating tropes, and occasionally with a particularly strange image that will complicate the reading. The themes are not at all fixed or particularly thought out, and I only ever notice them after making work for a time. I’m hesitant to describe the essential imagery in this selection, as I feel it to be a very personal thing, but there are certainly ways in which I’ve tried to advance the narrative and then to complicate it further. This, to me, is the most important balancing act. So, for instance, the image of the young girl with her camera phone by the bridge is an important moment, and even if it has a great deal of personal significance, this perhaps isn’t what is most interesting about it. Another example is the shot of the petrol station, which is a literal flash in the dark, a searing arrow, but its off-kilter angle and the deliberate poor framing are more essential. Both images particularly interest me because of their ambiguity.
Fragmentation seems to be a particular cultural concern these days, and there are other postmodern elements that emerge in the imagery
you make, such as a sense of alienation and melancholia. Are they reflective of your specific experiences in the places you visit or the people you photograph? Well, I certainly photograph with a certain detachment and distance, and this goes a long way to explaining the feeling of alienation in many of these scenes and vistas. I’ve always been fascinated by the perspective of the spectator watching the world unfold. I don’t think, though, that this is a unique or particular reaction to the places I’m living in and the people I’m photographing. I’m not especially interested in alienation or melancholia, I would rather the work be a little bit more ambiguous and to contain a more nuanced mood but perhaps these are indeed very melancholic times. In that light, I’ve included images that might be said to counter a sense of alienation. The overtly dramatic and cinematic images of sinister cars and strangers with tattoos are a way of reveling in the surface of the world surrounding us and the imagery that already exists in our minds, and to balance this there are images that serve to cut through it, photographs with very real and personal emotional weight. But the effect should only be temporary; often the scene and sentiment
will once again be subsumed and complicated by the nature of the photograph - the lighting, for instance - or by the next image.
Could you expand on what is so fascinating to you about the everyday and ordinary, and why they are key components of the images you produce? At the risk of giving an unsatisfactory answer, it seems to me that there are such endless variations and minute details and bizarre occurrences in the everyday world and our mundane surroundings that I can’t really understand why anyone would want to look elsewhere. But it should be said that although it’s the mundane world that interests me, the ‘everyday’ in the sense of routine and thoughtless repetition is not what concerns me. The everyday and mundane are just building blocks that I arrange for my own purposes; they are fundamentally a stage with props.
ILL 4
ILL 5
ILL 6
ILL 7
ILL 8
ILL 9
ILL 10
ILL 11
ILL 12
ILL 13
ILL 14
ILL 15
ILL 16
ILL 17
ILL 18
ILL 19
ILLUSTRATIONS ILL 1
Shadows of plants inside a window 1, 2016 4 x 6 inches
ILL 2
Shadows of plants inside a window 2, 2016 4 x 6 inches
ILL 3
Red Line, Istanbul, 2016 7.5 x 5 inches
ILL 4
Mary, 2016 4 x 6 inches
ILL 5
Bin, 2016 6.6 x 10 inches
ILL 6
Bosporus, 2016 4 x 6 inches
ILL 7
Celia looks out the window, 2016 4 x 6 inches
ILL 8
Bag of freshly cut grass, 2016 5 x 7.5 inches
ILL 9
Petrol Station, 2016 4 x 6 inches
ILL 10
Tina by the bridge, Serbia. 2016 6.6 x 10 inches
ILL 11
The bridge, Serbia, 2016 5 x 7.5 inches
ILL 12
Coats, 2016 7.5 x 5 inches
ILL 13
Plants inside a restaurant, 2016 6 x 4 inches
ILL 14
Celia talks by the door, 2016 7.5 x 5 inches
ILL 15
Light underneath a bridge, Istanbul, 2016 4 x 6 inches
ILL 16
Tree, 2016 4 x 6 inches
ILL 17
Man in Car, 2016 7.5 x 5 inches
ILL 18
Stone, Iran, 2016 5 x 7.5 inches
ILL 19
Legs 2, 2016 4 x 6 inches
ILL 20
Plant inside a bank, 2016 6 x 4 inches
All images courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Published by The Douglas Hyde Gallery on the occasion of the Samuel Laurence Cunnane exhibition, September 29 November 9, 2016. ISBN 978-1-905397-64-8 Copyright © 2016 the artist, authors and The Douglas Hyde Gallery The Douglas Hyde Gallery Trinity College Dublin 2 Ireland +353 1 896 1116 dhgallery@tcd.ie www.douglashydegallery.com The Douglas Hyde Gallery is funded jointly by The Arts Council, An Chomhairle Ealaíon, and Trinity College, Dublin
STAFF John Hutchinson Director Michael Hill Assistant Curator Rachel McIntyre Gallery Assistant BOARD Linda Doyle (Chair) Declan Long Valerie Mulvin Yvonne Scott Simon G. Williams PATRONS Dr. John Cooney Dónall Curtin & Anne O’Donoghue John Daly (Hillsboro Fine Art) Marie & Joe Donnelly Mark St John Ellis (nag gallery) Jonathan Ellis King (Ellis King) Maire & Maurice Foley Marie Heaney Ruth Hutchinson Peter & Paula Ledbetter Ariadne Ní Dhonnchú Adrian & Jennifer O’Carroll Kieran Owens & Eilis Fitzpatrick Joan Roth The Douglas Hyde Gallery would like to thank the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin for their support of the exhibition.