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
His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan (Rory Lewis Photographer) 2026
His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan. Photographed in July 2026. A head of state gives you a window, and the window is the window. There is no second sitting, no "let's try that again next week," no adjusting the light while everyone waits. You arrive knowing exactly what you intend to make, and you make it.
HRH Prince Michael of Kent (Rory Lewis Photographer 2022)
HRH Prince Michael of Kent, and HRH The Duke of Kent. Both portraits are being donated to the Royal Collection at Windsor. Royal sitters bring a specific discipline: the image will outlive the sitter, the photographer, and the occasion. You are not making content. You are making a record.
Lieutenant General James Bashall CBE. Commissioned a sitting at his headquarters in Aldershot. He commanded 1st Mechanised Brigade in Basra in 2007 and 2 Para in Afghanistan. I directed him side-on to show the paratrooper wings, and shot from a low angle. Senior officers do not want to be flattered. They want to be recognised.
Theresa May, and four other British Prime Ministers. A Prime Minister's diary is not a schedule, it is a negotiation between departments. You are given a room you have never seen, a duration that will shrink, and a sitter whose face is already the most photographed object in the country.
Eric Garcetti, US Ambassador to India and former Mayor of Los Angeles. That sitting was built on Hans Holbein the Younger — the unflinching realism Holbein brought to Cromwell and More. Not a soft-focus likeness. The objective truth of someone shaped by years of decisions.
A king. A prince. A general. A prime minister. A mayor.
None of them had time. All of them had approval rights. Every one of those portraits had to work first time.
Why this transfers directly to the boardroom
A chief executive is, from a photographer's side of the camera, a slightly easier version of a Field Marshal.
The constraints are identical. Limited time. Guarded sitter. High consequence if the image is wrong. Someone senior signing off. What differs is only the setting, and the setting is the part I control.
The skill a corporate client is actually buying is not lighting. Lighting can be learned in a weekend. The skill is direction under time pressure — knowing, within the first two minutes, which version of a person is in the room today, and how to get to the frame that is worth keeping before the goodwill runs out. That is what twenty-five years of photographing people who do not want to be photographed teaches you.
It is also why I do not shoot all-staff days for two hundred people. That is a different trade. What I do is the chairman, the founder, the managing partner, and the leadership team around them.
Ray Dalio (Rory Lewis Photographer 2022)
The leadership team is where most companies get this wrong
Almost every leadership page I am sent looks the same, and it looks the same for a structural reason: the portraits were made at different times, by different photographers, in different rooms, and then cropped to a matching square in the hope that nobody would notice.
Everybody notices. It reads as a company that assembled itself rather than one that was built.
A leadership set made properly in a single session — one light, one background discipline, one directing voice — reads as coherence. The chairman looks like he belongs to the same organisation as the CFO. That coherence is doing quiet work on an investor, a client, a candidate, long before anyone reads the bios.
For a team of five to twenty, that is a single day. It repeats annually as people join and leave. It is, for my money, the most undervalued photograph a company commissions.
