Samuel Ryde

Samuel Ryde is a London-based photographer with a passion for noticing the un-noticed objects and architecture of everyday human life. Through his lens, remarkable characters emerge from unremarkable spaces: Hand dryers in washrooms, telephone boxes on street corners, derelict buildings daubed with old signs and new graffiti - all of them tell accidental stories and ruminants of moments shared by other people in another place and time.

Samuel’s debut book ‘Hand Dryers’, with a foreword by Sir James Dyson, was published by Unicorn in 2020.  This book was the first of its type documenting but repressing the industrial object we’re all familiar and asking the viewer to take a fresh look at the world it is in and the way we treat the anonymity of a bathroom. This release enjoyed features in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Magazine plus others.

Samuel’s continuation of his other long-term project, 12:34 pm, in which he has documented the time 12:34 pm every day since 2012 was recently watched by over a million people on the BBC. This project attempts to capture the mundane moments of life to gather the true honesty of how we live your life average. If you could look at your life from a distance what colour would it be? Would it look the way you imagined?