Richard Learoyd was born in Lancashire, England in 1966 and studied Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art under Thomas Joshua Cooper, graduating in 1990.
Learoyd is one of today’s leading photographers, known for his large-scale, emotive and exquisitely detailed photographic portraits and still-lifes.
His colour photographs are produced using one of the oldest forms of image-making, the camera obscura. Predating the invention of photography, the camera obscura was originally used by artists as an aid to drawing, allowing them to accurately observe and reproduce perspective.
Using a custom-built, room-sized camera obscura of his own creation, Learoyd harnesses the nature of this non-reproductive photographic process to produce a unique direct-positive image. Without the use of a negative, each photograph is inextricably linked to the fleeting moment captured, never to be seen again.
The resulting photographs possess an incredible level of detail, uncanny in their suggestion that the sitter is not merely portrayed on the paper, but that they might, in their unavoidable vitality, walk off the page.
Learoyd’s subjects range from portraiture and still-life to nudes and landscapes, through which the artist explores intentionality, perception, and the subtext within the image. Imbuing his subjects with a sense of the surreal, and an extraordinary depth of both image and emotion, Learoyd subverts our traditional expectations of photography. The painstaking process of positioning and lighting his sitters can take hours, while the image itself is produced in a matter of moments, followed by an eighteen-minute processing time.
As Peggy Roalf observed in her introduction to an interview with the artist in Aperture, no. 199, 2010:
“The massive scale and surface quality of Learoyd’s portraits share features with both the painting and the photography of nineteenth-century France; they have an intentionality that is imposed by the maker rather than received from the sitter. This is perhaps why his photographs invoke the sublime.”
Learoyd immortalises his sitters within a seemingly endless void. Harnessing the nature of his chosen medium, the final images emanate the quiet beauty of each subject while seeming to give the viewer a window into the sitter’s mind, their eyes seeing far beyond the limits of the photograph. The viewer invited in by the simplicity of the image and held captive by the incredible luminosity and magnified detail of the work before them.
As Learoyd explains:
“A photograph should have the ability to communicate the sense of humanity, especially if it’s a picture of a person. And it should have an internal narrative that allows you to walk away with a question or two in your mind.”
Richard Learoyd in ‘Inside Richard Learoyd’s giant camera’ by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018
Richard Learoyd has held solo exhibitions at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His works are housed in numerous important public collections including Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate in London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among others.
Illustrated: Artist by BillEggleston, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
