H.M His Majesty King Abdullah II (Rory Lewis Photographer 2026)
There is a particular silence that settles over a room when a royal sitter takes their place before the camera. It is not deference, exactly — more a shared understanding that the photograph being made is not merely a likeness, but a document. A royal portrait outlives its moment. It hangs in corridors and collections long after the sitter has left the room, and it will be read, decades hence, by people who never met them.
That understanding has shaped my work for twenty-three years. My sitters have included Prince Michael of Kent and the Duke of Kent; I have been commissioned by members of the British Royal Family and by the Royal Hashemite Court of Jordan to make official State Portraits, and most recently photographed His Majesty King Abdullah II. Sixteen of my works now sit in the Royal Collection's permanent collection, and seven in the National Portrait Gallery's. These are not credentials I recite lightly — they are a record of trust, and that trust is the whole of the work.
The Court Painter's Inheritance
Royal portraiture has a grammar, and it was written long before the camera. Holbein gave Henry VIII his immovable mass; Van Dyck gave Charles I an elegance that outlasted his reign. Both understood that a sovereign's portrait must carry two things at once: the person and the office. Too much of the person and the image becomes merely intimate; too much of the office and it becomes a costume.
H.R.H Prince Michael of Kent (Rory Lewis Photographer) 2026
My approach draws directly on that lineage. I light with the tenebrism and chiaroscuro of the Old Masters — a single, deliberate source carving the face out of shadow — because that light confers gravity without ornament. A royal portrait should not need to announce itself. The light, the posture and the stillness do that work.
Royal Portraiture in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles
Since relocating to Los Angeles in 2022, I have brought this same practice to clients across Southern California — Beverly Hills included. Royal and noble families, diplomats, and those who simply wish to be photographed with the seriousness of a State Portrait can sit with me at my Downtown Los Angeles studio, a short drive from Beverly Hills, under precisely the conditions I bring to commissions in London and New York.
The sitting itself is unhurried. We discuss in advance what the portrait is for — an official likeness, a private commission, a family record — and I build the light and composition around that purpose. Discretion is, as it must be, absolute.
H.R.H Prince Edward Duke of Kent (Rory Lewis Photographer) 2026