Books Department Store Photography Product Publication Publishing

Hand Dryers by Samuel Ryde

posted by Robyn Pitts May 12, 2020

Hand Dryers, based on Samuel Ryde’s Instagram account, is the world’s most complete collection of hand dryers. Who knew that something so normal, so instantly forgettable, so remarkably unremarkable could be a thing of such beauty and intrigue?

The book documents a stalwart of industrial design, an item so every day and prosaic, yet each one imbued with its own vitality. The evocative photographs, taken around the world from Ukraine to Los Angeles, showcase the variety of design, and relationship to the environment. Some ooze nightclub sex appeal and dazzle; some a clinical sleekness; others a work-horse charm. The stories they could tell.

Samuel Ryde is a British documentary photographer living in London, and travelling the world. Having studied photography until 2000, it has taken until now to show his first complete body of work, Hand Dryers. He has an obsession with documenting the conventional parts of life we don’t notice; his Instagram project @twelvethirtyfourpm is testament to this, an eight-year body of work in which Samuel took one photo everyday at 12.34pm.