Richard Learoyd Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1966 -

Richard Learoyd's work is the product of a specific but particularly remarkable process. His images are produced individually as singular objects. Utilizing a distinct photographic method he creates life sized images inside a specifically built camera. This construction captures the image without any interposing film negative, transparency or intermediate material. Instead the apparatus of light is directly focussed by the camera and translated onto a sheet of positive photographic paper. With no means of reproduction, once created, ultimately every image is entirely unique in its existence.

The photographs are created and conceived as a whole, not as fragments or miniaturisations of objects and people. Whilst being made, the image is viewed by standing in the camera. The transient and realistic images of people are translated on a white board on a black wall, the ultimate personal cinema, or mechanised camera obscura.

All photographs are produced within a single room. A process in itself, objects and people are brought to the camera, positioned and arranged in front of it in order to create still lives or portraits. Artless compositions and simple constructions belie complex and restrictive rules dictated by the physics of optics and light. They import a sense of obscurity that contrasts with the reasonableness and regulations of some photographic formalities. Portraits, nudes and objects all share the same realistic treatment. Unlike pinhole photography, Learoyd’s images are without any distortion and are in no way compromised by the manner of his camera’s construction. He considers the method he uses to be a natural step in search of the ultimate image, not only in its ability to create a likeness but also in the object's ability to translate the intention of the maker. The image’s wholeness and engrossing realism redefines the photographic illusion.

The objects are not mundane every day objects taken in situ, they are staged on their own pedestals for closer inspection. A glossy squid joins the decadent tableaux of entities: nudes, flowers and marble sculptures. The colours are rich and the detail indulgent, but there is a distilled quietness, sustained within their own hermetic condition.

Richard Learoyd is one of the most influential and innovative photographers working today. Famous for using a room-sized camera obscura to make his images, Learoyd's technique results in unique prints that are outstanding in their detail and ambition.

Learoyd was born in Lancashire, England, in 1966 and studied Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art. His professor was the esteemed photographer, Thomas Joshua Cooper, and it was here that he first began experimenting with using a camera obscura to make his images. The camera obscura, literally meaning dark chamber,' has a long history and is considered an ancestor of the camera. In its simplest form it was originally just a room with a single small hole, through which a beam of light shone, resulting in an upside-down image on the opposite wall.

By exposing the beam of light directly onto photographic paper Learoyd makes do without a negative, resulting in a print that contains no grain a pure photographic imprint that is a unique impression. Both in his technique and emphasis on print as object, Learoyd's work has much in common with nineteenth century photography, and in particular the daguerreotype. In an interview with Aperture magazine in 2015 Learoyd confirmed this debt:

I see my work more in the lineage of the French referring to daguerreotypes: those non-reproducible photographic objects whose multi-planed surface and miraculous depth of field fascinate me. With my work I am interested in the moment when the image becomes dye and color, when the illusion of it being a reflection or projection breaks down. I think you get that sense with daguerreotype images: you see the object before the illusion.'

His work has been collected by numerous important museums including the John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Tate Modern, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In October 2015 a major exhibition of his work opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum, to be followed in 2016 by an exhibition at the John Paul Getty Museum.