The sitting took place inside the keep of Richmond Castle in North Yorkshire — Norman stone, twelfth century, and a commission from The Light Dragoons, of whom His Majesty is Colonel-in-Chief. I had one light, a dark ground, and a short window of time. What came out of it were three frames I would put beside anything I have made in twenty years behind a camera.
I mention it not to impress you but to make a point about method. Because the thing I did in that keep is exactly the thing I do for a chief executive in Beverly Hills, an author in Bel Air, or a founder on Wilshire Boulevard. The subject changes. The craft does not.
Most of what passes for professional photography in Los Angeles is a headshot: bright, even, agreeable, forgotten. It exists to be scrolled past. It tells a viewer what you look like and nothing else.
A portrait is a different proposition. A portrait is an argument about who someone is, made in light.
My training is not in commercial photography — it is in history and in painting. I read Medieval History at King's College London, and I have spent my working life looking at how the old masters solved the problem of putting a person on a surface. Titian understood that a single raking light across a face does more than a room full of illumination. Rembrandt understood that darkness is not the absence of subject but the frame around it. The Renaissance portraitists knew that a three-quarter turn holds authority in a way that a full-face smile never can.
I use their solutions. A deep, controlled key. A ground that falls away to black. Nothing in the frame but the sitter and the decision they are making about how to meet the lens. It is why my portraits of Field Marshals, of former Prime Ministers, of soldiers and of actors all share a family resemblance — and why they still look correct ten years on, when a fashionable headshot from the same year has aged badly.
Who this is for
I make portraits in Los Angeles for people who need an image that will do serious work over a long period:
Executives and board members — the portrait that runs with the annual report, the press announcement, the keynote billing. It should look like leadership, not like a staff directory.
Founders and principals — investors and journalists form an impression before they read a word. Make it the right one.
Attorneys, physicians, and advisors — professions in which gravitas is not vanity but a commercial asset.
Authors, artists, and performers — the jacket photograph, the press image, the portrait that will be reproduced for a decade.
Private and family portraiture — heirloom work, made to be printed, framed, and hung. Photographs that a grandchild will one day take down from a wall and be glad of.
The sitting
Sittings take place at my studio in Downtown Los Angeles, or on location in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and across the Westside where a client's home, office, or club is the better setting.
A sitting is unhurried. I do not photograph a hundred frames and hope. I build the light, I talk to you, and I wait for the moment your face stops performing and starts simply being — which is usually somewhere in the second half hour, and which is the entire point of the exercise. Two dozen exposures. A handful that work. One that is right.
Every portrait is retouched personally by me, to a standard that removes distraction without removing the person. I do not smooth people into strangers.
Fine art prints are produced on archival paper and can be supplied framed, at any size from the desk to the boardroom wall.
Provenance
My portraits are held in the Royal Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Army Museum. I have photographed former Prime Ministers, members of the Royal Family, senior commanders of the British and allied armed forces, and figures across British and American cultural life. I relocated from London to Los Angeles in 2022 and now work between LA, London, and New York.
I say this only because provenance matters when you are choosing who will make the photograph that represents you. You would ask it of a surgeon. Ask it of a portraitist.
Enquiries
I take a limited number of commissions in Los Angeles each month, and I prefer to speak with a client before agreeing to a sitting — it is a collaborative process and it works far better when both parties want the same photograph.
rl@rorylewis.studio 411 South Main Street, Unit 222, Los Angeles, California 90013 rorylewis.studio
