Los Angeles Studio Dates: 14 August – 17 September 2026

The Downtown studio is open from 14 August to 17 September. Five weeks, and then the diary moves east.

What you are actually booking

There are a great many people in this city who will photograph your face. There are rather fewer who were trained on Holbein and Van Dyck and who still light a sitter the way Caravaggio lit a saint.

Everything made in this studio is lit — deliberately, from a single dominant source, with the shadow doing as much work as the light. That is not a stylistic flourish. It is how portraiture worked for four hundred years before photography arrived and quietly forgot it. A face modelled that way holds the eye. It reads at thumbnail size on a casting platform and it reads at forty inches on a boardroom wall, which is a harder trick than it sounds.

Twenty-three years of practice sit behind that. Seven works in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Sixteen in the Royal Collection. More than a hundred and fifty acquired by the National Army Museum. Five British Prime Ministers. Reigning monarchs. Oscar and Emmy winners who came through this room and left with something their grandchildren will keep.

Who this month is for

Actors. The autumn casting cycle begins the moment Los Angeles comes back from August. If your headshot was made two years ago, or made by someone chasing a pretty picture rather than a castable one, the next six weeks are when to fix it. A headshot is not a flattering photograph. It is a piece of casting information, and it should tell a casting director in half a second what you can carry.

Executives and founders. This is the work I would most like more of in Los Angeles, and it is the work this city photographs worst. The standard American corporate headshot — flat, bright, evenly lit, indistinguishable from the next one on the leadership page — communicates nothing except that a photographer attended. An executive portrait ought to say something about the person's authority and their judgement. Boards, funds, law firms, studio leadership: these are portraits that get used for a decade.

Legacy sittings. Portraits made because someone is worth recording, not because a platform requires an image. Family principals, founders at the end of a career, collectors. These are the sittings I care most about.

Photographers. One-to-one tuition in the studio. Lighting, direction, and the business of the thing.

The studio

Downtown Los Angeles, in the Farmers & Merchants Bank building — 1905 marble, twenty-foot ceilings, and a room built long before anyone thought a portrait should be made against a white cyclorama.

Booking

Sessions run 45, 60, 90 and 120 minutes. Corporate, executive and legacy commissions are quoted individually.

Email RL@rorylewis.studio with the date range you are looking at and what the portrait is for. Five weeks fill quickly, and the last week before I leave for New York always goes first.