Photographing Ray Dalio

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.

Photographing Ray Dalio (Rory Lewis New York Corporate Headshots Photographer)

The approach

One dominant source, placed high and slightly off axis, with the fall-off allowed to run deep. Nothing lifting the shadow side beyond what was needed to keep detail in the cloth. The method is Caravaggio's and I make no apology for saying so plainly: light from one direction, darkness permitted to remain dark, and the face emerging rather than presented.

The reason it suits a mind like this is that it removes almost everything. There is no environment to read, no desk, no bookshelf standing in for authority. What is left is bone structure and attention.

Photographing Ray Dalio (Rory Lewis New York Corporate Headshots Photographer)

The eleven minutes

I have said elsewhere that most portraits are decided in about eleven minutes — the interval after the sitter has stopped arranging themselves and before they become tired of being looked at. With Dalio the interval arrived when we stopped talking about the portrait entirely.

The frame I kept is one in which he is not addressing anyone. He is considering something, and the consideration has weight to it. That is what a portrait of a thinker ought to contain, and it is almost the only thing that cannot be manufactured.

Why this matters for a corporate commission

I am often asked, by firms in finance particularly, whether a portraitist who works this way can produce something appropriate for a fund's website or an annual report. The answer is that this is the appropriate thing. A page of principals photographed flatly tells an investor that the firm regards its own people as interchangeable. A page of portraits made properly says something else.

The method does not require the sitter to perform gravitas. It requires forty-five minutes and a willingness to stop talking for part of it.

Executive and principal portraits in New York, Los Angeles and London. Email RL@rorylewis.studio.