Sara Cucé

I’ve been experimenting with film photography and darkroom printing from 2017, when I was studying photography at the BA degree at London Metropolitan university. There was a communal darkroom there that we (students of my course) could use for free, and I remember clearly the first time I visited that darkroom. Our lecturers explaining how to load film in total darkness for developing, the strong smell in the air, the red light and the very first sheet of photosensitive paper I’ve submerged the developer, starting at that intensely until some forms were appearing and a final print was magically ready to be washed and dried. It was a unique mix of feelings, I think a mixture of excitement and curiosity mixed with a deep concentration and that feeling of home, like I could always return to that darkroom and feeling like in a womb, embracing that darkness, that space in which I was dreaming, envisioning, creating. I started to experiment with printing processed and with different techniques, going back to the darkroom very often, again and again.


This series, ‘Memory of the eyes’ is the very result of those experiments and that time of research and understanding and looking for a place to be (inside and outside).


I’ve started working of this visual diary and never stopped since then, always taking photographs on black and white film, and on a simple 35mm camera.



This photograph ‘This body is no one’s home III’ , was shot while I was experimenting with shooting a roll of film and then rewinding it and reshooting it. I was visiting places in London that reminded me vaguely of home (Sicily) and I initially took portrait of a friend, then, after rewinding the film, I was thinking to play with the idea of chance and fate (like Duane Michals ‘Chance meeting’ vague inspiration), and I took a second round of photographs on a canal in London, including photographs of plants, leaves, the surface of the water, someone running along the canal and a fisherman, oddly fishing on that canal and a plate of 3 fishes. The fisherman took a fish while I was taking a second and a thirs photograph of the plate, and the light was going down at sunset. That was a very strong symbol of the symbols I belong to, that were so familiar and I could easily reconnect it to the fisherman village not too far from the city where I grew up… and I ended up with a short sequence of photographs that reconnected me with my memories, my essence, the things that shaped me while I was growing up and those little signs I look for to find myself in a completely different life and context. I think that’s why I’m very connected with this photograph and I believe it does have a strong story and energy.



I then developed the film roll; I printed a contact sheet, and I loved the sequence. I carried on experimenting with this technique, not always with great results and I decided to include in the visual diary only the most relevant results, whether they were double exposures or single shot images.

Sara Cucè is a London-based artist working with analog photography and a freelance curator, graduated from the MA in Curating Art and Public Programmes (LSBU & Whitechapel Gallery) in 2022 and from a BA Photography degree in 2017. Currently working as gallery registrar, Cucè is also developing an ongoing body of work and experimentations begun in 2017.
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Her work explores questions of identity, migration, belonging, memory, and the environment. It has been included in in numerous exhibitions throughout United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
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Cucè is the winner of the Life Framer Award 2022; also one of the 100 GUP Fresh Eyes Photo Talent 2022, and finalist of the LensCulture HOME '21 International Photo Prize in 2021.

Previously finalist at the Magnum Photography Awards, the Magnum Print Swap Shop, the Royal Photographic Society IPE 160 and the Photography on a Postcard 2017.
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During 2021-22, Sara co-curated 'Tracing Absence', an exhibition with artworks selected from the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation, that opened at Whitechapel Gallery in London from Aug 2022 to January 2023, and currently touring to Kistefos Museum in Norway until October 2023.