Richard Learoyd

Richard Learoyd has become renowned for his custom-built camera obscura which contains two large room-like chambers and a fixed lens to create exquisitely detailed and personal images.

He was born in Nelson, Lancashire in 1966 and studied Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art. Until his photographic work was exhibited in 2002, Learoyd worked as a commercial photographer and professor at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design.

His work has gained recognition for his attention to process and exceptional technical precision. The camera obscura enables Learoyd to render a unique image without film negatives or digital processing, reducing photography to its essential elements. With a shallow depth of field, his portraits are intimate with an almost grainless rendering of flesh. His floral still-life images offer a juxtaposition between beauty and decay, alluding to the inevitability of mortality.

The camera obscura is not limited to the studio; Learoyd has made various location cameras with varying focal lengths to capture imposing landscapes, travelling as far as California to photograph Yosemite National Park.

In 2015, Aperture released Richard Learoyd: Day for Night, a comprehensive survey of colour portraits and studio work. That same year, the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted his first solo museum exhibition, Dark Mirror. Learoyd’s work is included in the collections of the Getty Museum, Tate, Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Canada, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others.