💼 Corporate & Editorial Headshots
Ray Dalio (Rory Lewis Photographer 2026)
Los Angeles · New York · London
A corporate headshot is more than a photograph — it’s your first impression, your credibility, your visual handshake.
Rory Lewis creates refined, editorial-style portraits for executives, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals who need to project confidence, authority, and approachability in equal measure. These are not generic business headshots, but carefully directed portraits designed to align with your professional goals, industry position, and personal brand.
Ideal for LinkedIn, company websites, press features, investor decks, and executive branding, each session is tailored to the individual — from lighting and composition to expression and posture — ensuring the final image feels authentic, assured, and contemporary.
Individual and group sessions are available, making this offering equally suited to leadership teams, company-wide rebrands, boards, partnerships, and editorial-style team portraits.
Sessions are available in-studio or on location across Los Angeles, New York, and London, delivering polished, high-end portraits that communicate leadership, clarity, and presence across global markets.markets.
Recent Collaborations
Marvin Jones II came to the Main Street studio in downtown Los Angeles for a set of portraits to carry his personal platform, his family office and the ventures that sit beneath both. He is an entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, and he arrived with a clear brief. The pictures had to work as a suite. Several registers, one man, and none of it looking like a corporate headshot.
There is a question every marketing director eventually asks me, usually in the third or fourth email, usually phrased carefully. It is some version of: can you handle our chairman?
What they mean is: he has forty minutes, he does not enjoy being photographed, he has approval over the final image, and the last three attempts were quietly shelved. They are not asking about my lighting. They are asking whether I will make the situation worse.
The honest answer is a list of names.
The people who taught me to work in twenty minutes
An annual report portrait has to survive being printed at size, sitting next to eleven others, and being looked at by people deciding whether to trust the company. An ordinary headshot has to survive being three centimetres wide on a website. They are different objects and the difference shows.
Open twenty corporate leadership pages and you will see the same photograph twenty times. Grey background or white. Even light, no shadow anywhere. A slight turn of the shoulders. An expression somewhere between welcome and apology. The subjects differ; the portraits do not.
Some sitters arrive having decided in advance what a photograph is for. Ray Dalio is one of them.
He is a man who has spent decades being listened to carefully, and who has written at length about how thinking should be done. That produces a particular problem for a portraitist, and it is not the one people assume. The difficulty is not reticence. It is fluency. A person accustomed to explaining themselves clearly will keep explaining, and a face that is mid-explanation is a face performing a function rather than occupying itself.
What I wanted was the pause before the sentence.
Two days of sittings in Midtown on 17 and 18 September, at Young Studio on 8th Avenue, followed by the New York masterclass on the Saturday. Actors, executives and commissioned portraits — one light, dark ground, as always.
On Friday 11 September 2026 I am opening the Downtown Los Angeles studio for a single day of thirty-minute headshot update sessions. Each one gives you two looks and one retouched image, and it is the only date this year I will offer them.
14 August – 17 September 2026 · 411 S Main Street, Unit 222, Downtown Los Angeles
My Los Angeles diary is open from 14 August to 17 September, and I am now taking bookings for headshot sessions, commissioned portrait sittings, and private tuition. After 17 September I return to London and New York, and these are the last extended Los Angeles dates before the autumn.
Recently, I had the pleasure of working with Sean Henney, a man who is as focused on the future of private markets technology as I am on the future of fine-art portraiture.
Lighting the "Data Obsessed" Professional
When Sean came to me, we talked about his mission—navigating the "hardest problem" in his industry: data. My goal as a photographer isn’t just to get a clear shot of a face; it’s to use cinematic lighting to reveal the character of the person solving those problems.
Last month in my Central London studio, I had the pleasure of capturing a series of cinematic headshots and portraits of Jonathan Sacerdoti—a British broadcaster, journalist, producer, and prominent voice on issues of extremism, antisemitism, race relations, Middle Eastern affairs, and the British royal family. Known for his sharp analysis and measured commentary across networks including Fox News, i24news, Cheddar, E! Daily Pop, and Us Weekly, Jonathan brings a unique blend of intellect, lived experience, and clarity to contemporary public discourse.
In my London studio, I had the pleasure of photographing Ana Emdin, an accomplished film producer whose work spans both the UK and the international stage. From the moment she stepped in front of the camera, Ana brought a poised elegance and quiet confidence that lent itself beautifully to portraiture rooted in restraint, presence, and depth.
Through cinematic lighting and thoughtful direction, Rory created portraits that reflect Sexton’s commanding presence and human depth, embodying the drive and character that make him a force in and beyond the courtroom.
Bob Johnston sat for me in Los Angeles last month. He is the founder and chief executive of Exec.org, and his working life is built on introductions: putting a chief executive in front of the person who can move the thing along, a company in front of capital, a board in front of the director it did not know it needed. He also sits as an independent director and on audit committees, which is a different discipline again, and a quieter one.