Aptly named Holy Joe’s, Irish-born photographer Kim Cunningham’s project depicts a social centre near her home in Highgate, north London. Intrigued by the way members, like many diaspora, preserved notions of Irish identity, she says, “It’s like any other social club in Britain. But it has close links to the church. I wanted to try and capture this essence of Irish society, romanticised or real, that we don’t have in Ireland any more”.

Cunningham’s photographs suggest that religion is ever present in her subjects’ lives, without ever resorting to the populist view of the influence of Irish Catholicism as guilt-ridden and puritanical. An elderly couple dance together in close tenderness, while another sit under a framed picture of the Irish coastline that sports the greeting, “Céad Mile Fáilte” – “a hundred thousand welcomes”. This same warmth comes through in her portrait of a co30mmunity that has created a home away from home.

A graduate from the acclaimed MA in documentary photography at the University of Wales at Newport, Cunningham says long-term projects are her preferred approach. “I don’t go in and photograph quickly, I tend to get caught up,” she explains. But she’s aware of the danger of this open-ended approach. “I used to keep photographing and not think of the final outcome,” she admits. “The MA gave me the discipline to think about the project as a whole piece.” It was a discipline that allowed her to finish Holy Joe’s, which subsequently won an award in 2008 and was shown at  the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.

Cunningham currently spends her time between commissions and a personal project on her home village, Laytown in County Meath. “I’ve just got a commission from The Photographers’ Gallery connected to the London Olympics. I just went in [to see them] with my last project and they asked if I would like to be one of the photographers for this commission.”