Polly Samson Brings Her Photographic World to Leica Gallery London

For years, Polly Samson has existed adjacent to the frame. Known widely for her fiction and for lyrics written outside David Gilmour, her creative presence has often been felt through language rather than image. Between This Breath and Then, which opened at Leica Gallery London on 28 March, hosts that perspective. It places her photography at the center of the conversation for the first time. 

The exhibition draws from more than two decades spent documenting concert tours and recording sessions, moving between film and digital photography with the same instinctive rhythm found in her writing. Many of the works originate from Luck and Strange Studio/Live, Samson’s recent photographic book tracing the atmosphere surrounding Gilmour’s latest album. What emerges is not a backstage document in the traditional sense, but something quieter and more psychologically observant. 

There is an unmistakable literary quality to the work, though not in an illustrative sense. Her framing carries the tension of narrative without offering complete resolution. Certain photographs suggest stories that remain just beyond reach, inviting viewers to sit with ambiguity. An image like Muse and Magpie hints at a personal story while resisting explanation altogether. 

That ambiguity becomes part of the exhibition’s wider meditation on authorship and presence. Samson repeatedly turns the camera towards the spaces between artist and observer, asking where creativity truly resides. In collaboration, in performance, in the person holding the lens. The photographs never insist on an answer. 

The partnership with Leica feels natural in that context. Across more than a century, the company has maintained a close relationship with photographers whose work privileges atmosphere and instinct over technical display. Samson’s images align with that tradition. Light becomes the organising principle throughout the exhibition, softening certain frames while intensifying others, always carrying emotional weight. 

What makes Between This Breath and Then compelling is its refusal to romanticise artistic life. The photographs acknowledge exhaustion, routine and silence alongside moments of energy and connection. Touring becomes less about performance itself and more about the fragile emotional architecture that surrounds it. 

Running until 7 May, the exhibition marks another expansion of Samson’s multidisciplinary practice, an extension of writing in another form. The same sensitivity to rhythm, tension and restraint remains present throughout. Only now, the sentences arrive through light instead of words.