The Shots That Shaped His Path
Sam Larner
"I learn by being thrown in the deep end and trying to swim.”
"I've always wanted to [ceremonially] marry someone; it'll be a fun thing to do," he tells me. "When all your kind of close friends start getting married, you wonder, 'What is my role going to be?'”
It's a very Sam question - how can I help? He wants to be thrown into it. He wants to support the people around him. He'll do it entirely as himself, bringing what he brings best to the table: laughter.
When the day finally arrived, there was just one problem: "There was no MIC. I had to project," he laughs. "Think about it - it's hard to be nuanced in your delivery of the beautiful, beautiful words you've written if you're shouting them in people's faces." Then Sam casually mentions, "I was nervous too. I hadn't performed in front of a crowd for a while. But you kind of just hope that that old acting thing will kick in... that you 'live off the crowd.’"
Up until this point, I thought I was interviewing a photographer who happened to be unusually comfortable in potentially uncomfortable situations. It was then I discovered Sam was a jack of all trades, having experienced the highs and lows of not one, but two careers. The truth is, what potentially makes a good portrait photographer might not be who they are or what talent they possess, but everything that came before.
Sam Larner
A Tale of Two Talents
“I felt quite lucky because while everyone else was having that moment of ‘What do I want to do?’, I just always knew what I wanted to do.”
When I ask Sam where he gets his confidence from, he points back to his childhood. "I've always wanted to be an actor," he tells me. He describes watching the behind-the-scenes feature on his Spider-Man DVD as though an innate calling had been stirred. Asked what sort of child he was, he laughs that he was "strange-looking," with "a gap in his teeth" that remained even after years of braces. Sam believes that distinctive look eventually worked in his favour, helping him secure commercial work for brands including Lynx and Now TV. One advert in particular gave him the taste of fame he'd been chasing since he was a kid. Sam describes the event: “I was dressed like this vampire for the ad. I rose from a coffin, said a little line and then went back into my coffin. It was the advert before every YouTube video for months." During that time, Sam was in his twenties and still living the strange in-between life familiar to creatives on the cusp of fame, recognisable enough for strangers to stop him, but not established enough to leave his part-time job. "I was working at a bar, and people would always be like, 'You're the guy dressed like the vampire.' You'd think it'd be fun, but when you're just working shit jobs... they're like, 'What are you doing working at a bar!?"' It was an early glimpse of how strange fame can be, but it didn't deter him.
While his distinctive look may have opened certain doors, Sam's acting career was never built on appearance alone. Sam reached milestones that would have required talent beyond an interesting face, including being accepted into the National Youth Theatre. For him, it was not only a highlight of his early career, but also a more weighted affirmation of his goal. He admits he wasn't the strongest actor there, but what he remembers most fondly was something he hadn't found at school; "It was the first time I was surrounded by people who wanted to be actors more than anything in the world… suddenly I was around all these people who were just like me.”
Up until then, Sam had felt slightly different from his peers - he liked school, but while his friends worried about subjects, university and what they might eventually do with their lives, Sam already knew. He recognised that kind of certainty as a rare privilege and anything that might pull him away from acting felt like a distraction.
Until music: "I watched my sister do a gig, and she'd written songs and played a gig at the Troubadour. I thought, 'That's really cool. I want to be there.'" So, Sam picked up a guitar, taught himself some chords, and performed a song for the toughest critic he knew: his mum.
"She told me I wasn't very good." Sam laughs.
For most people, that would have been the sign to stop. For Sam, it was only a challenge - the determination that had always driven his acting began to seep into music. "I spent a year in my room practising singing every day. Then the next year, when I was fifteen, I did my first gig at the Troubadour. I sang all my own songs." Being self-taught meant Sam could shape his voice around the musicians he admired: raspy, husky, and inspired by Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Damien Rice - purposefully different to other emerging artists. I asked what a fifteen-year-old was writing about then. While there is an undertone of humour, Sam tells me honestly, "Heartbreak, drinking, smoking. It was all very 'I'm on the edge... who knows what's gonna happen?'... 'Am I lovable? Do I even know how to love?' All that kind of stuff. It was very intense.”
His residency at the Troubadour started to gain attention; he got invitations to perform at more exclusive events, including the American Ambassador's residence, where he found himself playing one of Nick Cave's guitars and performing alongside ‘The National’, then one of his favourite bands. His music reached the rooms of Warner Music, and the office of the head of Apple Music, leading to meetings about fast-tracking his career. "I remember thinking, 'This is it. This is my moment.'" He had management. He had industry backing. He had every reason to believe the breakthrough he'd spent years working towards was finally within reach.
Yet Sam also began learning how fragile success in the industry could be. The day after performing alongside The National, he watched them again at Hyde Park, this time from somewhere in a crowd of two hundred thousand. "I'd gone from being next to them, being in it, to then just being in the crowd only a day later," he remembers. "It was a very humbling experience for me."
Sam Larner
Almost Famous
“I started focusing so much more on what other people wanted that I kind of lost what I wanted.”
With each push forward, Sam describes relentless contradictions and setbacks. Management began directing Sam towards a more commercially viable sound. "I started trying to change my voice, become more sellable," he tells me. "I started making music that they liked... then I changed the way I sang, and I changed the way I wrote." Gradually, the compliments that had once encouraged him forward began to disappear. "People slowly stopped saying that I sounded amazing and unique. They'd just be like, 'Yeah... that's alright.'" The biggest thing Sam felt he’d lost during this period wasn't a record deal, but autonomy. “I started focusing so much more on what other people wanted that I kind of lost what I wanted," he says. "I lost that youthful, no-fucks-given energy." The teenager who had spent a year teaching himself to sing, driven by ambition to be better and different, had gradually become someone writing to satisfy everyone except himself.
From that, Sam lost his sense of self, and nowhere was it more evident than in the work he was making. Some of his final releases were covers; music he still considered good, but which also seemed to mirror how far he had drifted from creating anything that felt distinctly his own. Then COVID arrived. Management dissolved, the music stalled, and after years of pouring so much of himself into that career, Sam found himself confronting an unsettling thought: "I don't feel connected to my music anymore. I haven't really given acting any attention because I've been so focused on music. I don't think I'm really an actor anymore. I was miserable.”
For somebody who had spent most of his life knowing exactly what he wanted to become, suddenly feeling disconnected from both acting and music left Sam with very little certainty to fall back on. As his thirties approached, he had to imagine a future that looked different from the one he had spent most of his life working towards. "The only job I could think of doing if I couldn't do acting or singing would be photography," he remembers deciding. "I can make that happen.”
Although photography felt like a fresh direction, it also carried the comfort and familiarity of his childhood. Sam's father had always had a camera in his hands and had taught him manual film photography when he was younger. Sam had spent years carrying cameras, photographing family holidays and making stop-motion films. “Without wanting to or thinking about it being a career, I always enjoyed doing photography,” he says.
While Sam had no formal photographic education, using a camera at a basic level was hardly unfamiliar territory. Earlier, describing the National Youth Theatre, he told me he learnt best by "being thrown in the deep end and trying to swim." He approached photography with a similar ethos. He began shooting content for the bars and restaurants where he worked, and he offered to photograph friends' businesses, including Emmett London. It was, as he describes, "that terrible part of when you're getting into something new, and you're trying to convince people you're good. You're almost begging people to give you work," while feeling "very insecure about everything you're doing anyway," and forcing yourself to project a confidence that's not yet earned.
During the early years in photography, Sam continued to work a second job alongside it. Before one shift at a restaurant, he went to London Fields to clear his head - unsure of his decisions and needing a quiet moment to reflect. It was there, by chance, that he bumped into an old friend from his acting days, someone he had first met years earlier on a commercial. By then, his friend was working in portrait photography and later invited Sam in for a test shoot. A few weeks afterwards, Sam had the job. For Sam, the timing felt "serendipitous". At one of the lowest points in his creative life, an encounter rooted in his old acting career presented him with an opportunity that would become pivotal to his training as a photographer. "It was perfect for me," he tells me. "I was suddenly surrounded by all these really creative people who were really into what they were doing... I could suddenly learn very quickly. And practise every day.” It also speaks to the importance of not underestimating the connections made along the way. In creative industries, paths cross and recross in unexpected ways, and you never quite know when someone from an earlier chapter might reappear and shape the next.
Sam larner
A Life and A Lesson Worth Noticing
“You never know what thing is going to lead to another thing, and where your life is going to take you.”
One of the clearest places to see that identity taking shape is in the photographs Sam makes away from commissioned work. Diving into his personal work, a journey begins to emerge, with his girlfriend as a recurring subject: on holidays, over coffee, dancing through streets. Sam jokes that his Instagram has become something of a "shrine" to her, but her presence began for a practical reason. When they first started dating, she became the person he could practise with most freely, giving him space to experiment, build confidence and work without the pressure of a client over his shoulder. It was a level of vulnerability he could explore with someone he trusted. As Sam describes it, "We had this kind of archive of the first year of our relationship where it was us just going out and having coffee.”
Now, more than a record of their relationship developing, the work also documents Sam's growing confidence behind the camera. As the relationship becomes more familiar and intimate, his photographs grow more assured, eventually expanding into cinematography and editing as his skills develop. Sam describes himself as a romantic, and much of his personal work is driven by an instinct to make everyday life feel a little more cinematic, and a little more special. "I love romanticising the everyday," he tells me. Some of the glimpses into their relationship feel like frames from a romantic indie film, or fragments of an endless teenage dream. While Sam no longer inhabits somebody else's character as he once did through acting, or writes his own anxieties, loves, and hopes into songs, he still expresses himself through storytelling. We are offered insight into his psyche, only now filtered through Sam's lens rather than performed directly by him.
The theme of human connection also exists beyond the printed image. In shoots that require more direction, particularly fashion and editorial portraiture, Sam is less interested in imposing a character than building on the person already in front of him. “A lot of photography, especially portrait photography, is making people feel comfortable,” he explains. “You learn how to get the best picture out of people.” In a studio portrait of an ex-ballerina, Sam directed the pose but describes the process as collaborative, giving her an idea and letting her make it her own. “You are taking what they are and how they naturally come to you,” he says, while working “within the boundaries of who they are.”
Whether that instinct comes directly from his experience in music, Sam didn’t confirm, but the contrast is apparent. Sam spent years being encouraged to alter the qualities that made his own work distinctive; behind the camera, he talks instead about noticing and working with what is already there, preserving and admiring individuality, even leaning towards the more unpolished version of ourselves - perhaps his own quiet rebellion. Consequently, his work can feel reminiscent of Philippe Halsman and Juergen Teller: intimate yet loose, with the same sense that personality triumphs over perfection.
Having spent years on the other side of that vulnerability himself, Sam understands what it means to ask somebody to trust the person looking back at them through a camera. Maybe that's the secret to capturing something as subjective as character: he takes the time to get to know the person in front of him.
When I ask Sam to describe himself, it gravitates to something that sounds less like a personality trait and more like a way of life: "I'm a romantic", he confirms, like it's both a confession and a place of pride. That quality is overtly present in the photographs of his girlfriend, sure, but it also extends beyond his own life. In his street photography, he is drawn to strangers absorbed in their own moments: someone asleep on the Underground, someone reading, or listening to music, lost in thought. They feel romantic not because the subjects are doing anything conventionally romantic, but because Sam treats ordinary private moments as being worthy of attention - and knowing his background, you know the photos only come from a place of genuine intrigue and interest in that person's narrative. Sam describes himself as a "fly on the wall", enjoying documenting what is already there rather than asking somebody to become something for the camera.
Catching those moments also takes nerve. One final thing Sam seems to have carried into photography is a willingness to take risks. In his street work, that can be literal. If he sees a moment, he tends to take the photograph rather than overthink it. More generally, it is the same instinct that has followed him through acting, music and photography: stepping into something before he can be certain of the outcome. Creative careers are full of those moments. At some point, almost everyone creative in any industry has to risk embarrassment, rejection, or failure to move forward. Without that willingness, a great deal of art would never exist at all. Sam's story is full of those leaps: getting on stage, teaching himself to sing, changing direction, picking up a camera professionally before he felt confident with it. His advice to anyone wanting to start out, create something new, or change direction reflects the same attitude that has carried him this far: just do it. Every skill you learn and every path you try, even when it doesn’t materialise into what you hoped, is never really wasted; consider it a contribution to the exciting thing you choose to build next.