Rory Lewis Photographer Headshots & Portraiture

Richmond in the morning. The castle sits above the Swale on a crag and you come up to it through the market place, and then there is the keep, and then there is nothing above you but a hundred feet of Norman stone. I have photographed in cathedrals and in palaces. There is something about a keep. It was not built to be beautiful. It was built so that men could hold it.

I return to New York this August. From Saturday 9 to Wednesday 13 August, my studio at 580 8th Avenue — twenty floors above the Garment District, a few minutes' walk from Times Square and the theatre houses — will be open for actor headshots, portrait sittings, and corporate headshots.

There are faces the camera simply agrees with, and Fedly Daniel has one of them. He came to my Midtown Manhattan studio (580 8th Avenue, 20th Floor) for a new set of actor headshots, and from the first frame the session had that quality I'm always chasing — stillness with something moving underneath.

Yesterday, Andy Burnham accepted the invitation of King Charles III to form a government, and became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Speaking outside Number 10 — no lectern, standing freely in the street in that unmistakably direct Northern manner — he promised a "circuit breaker for Britain." My warmest congratulations to him. It is a remarkable moment for the country, and, I confess, a quietly extraordinary one for me.

Join award-winning photographer Rory Lewis for an immersive photography workshop on lighting and direction techniques.

What you'll learn:

• Lighting techniques for headshots and portraiture

• How to direct your subjects for natural, compelling shots

• Tips to enhance your photography portfolio

This workshop is perfect for photographers of all levels, from beginners to seasoned professionals. Rory's engaging teaching style ensures you'll gain practical skills and knowledge that will elevate your portrait photography to the next level.

There's a particular pleasure in a sitter you clock the moment they come through the door, and Alex Wyndham was one of them — Maecenas himself, Octavian's silken fixer from the second season of Rome, standing in my Downtown LA studio some seventeen years on and none the worse for it. I confess I said as much straight away, which is not always the done thing with actors, but there it was. One doesn't forget a face that spent a whole season murmuring political poison into a young Caesar's ear.

The stage actor's face, and what a camera asks of it

There is a particular ease to photographing an actor who has spent real time on a stage. The instrument is already tuned. Francis Price came to the Main Street studio with exactly that — a classically trained presence that knows how to hold stillness without going dead behind the eyes, which is the whole quiet art of a good headshot.

There's a particular kind of session that arrives when an actor steps back into the room after time away. The face is the same. The man behind it isn't — and the work, if it's any good, has to hold both.

Brian Kolb came to the Main Street studio to mark exactly that: a return to acting after a break, and the new narrative that comes with it. The brief was not one look, but range — the proof a casting director needs that a man can be cast in more than a single drawer. So we built six, and we built them to argue with each other.

Spent an afternoon at the Downtown studio with actor Elvis Winterbottom, in for a set of headshots built to carry across casting briefs. We talked a great deal between setups, and he turned out to be genuinely interesting company, the kind of sitter who makes the hours run away from you. We worked through a deliberate range of looks: a plain dark tee and mock neck for the stripped-back theatrical frames, a navy waffle knit, a tailored blazer over a soft blue shirt for the producer and executive read, and a weathered leather jacket for something with more grit. One man, several characters, which is exactly what a working actor needs the camera to hold.

I had the privilege this week of photographing Babs Olusanmokun in my London studio, and as I worked I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about how often I get to say that word — privilege — about the Black actors who find their way to my chair.

There is a particular quiet that settles over a portrait sitting when the subject is, by trade, a maker of sound. The performer who fills a room — who has stood in front of seventeen thousand people at the Coca-Cola Arena and held them — arrives in my studio and discovers that the only instrument I am asking him to play is his own stillness. Nick Pritchard understood this faster than most.

There's a moment, going back through the frames from a sitting, where you can feel the difference between a photograph that merely records a face and one that holds the room. It is rarely a question of the camera. Almost always it comes down to two things: how the light falls, and how the person in front of you was directed in the seconds before the shutter.

There is a particular satisfaction in taking down a body of work you have looked at for too long and replacing it with something better. I have just done exactly that. The headshot portfolio has been rebuilt from the ground up — newer sittings, harder edits, a great deal that didn't make the cut. What's left is, I think, the strongest the studio has put out.

Kiko Macan came to the Downtown Los Angeles studio this week for new headshots, and I was rather pleased he did. Kiko is one of those sitters who arrives with two careers in his pocket — actor and director — which makes the session a more interesting puzzle than usual. A headshot for an actor sells presence; a portrait for a director sells authority. We set out to do both.

Some sitters arrive at the studio with a CV; Jacobo Fe Gismera arrived with a biography that reads like one of his own screenplays. A Spaniard in Los Angeles by way of UCLA, he was the youngest novelist in Spain to publish in the historical genre, putting out his peplum novel Perfectus Imperator at nineteen, the same age he began a modelling career that has since run to hundreds of publications across a dozen or more countries.

Most of the best things that happen in this trade arrive sideways, by way of a handshake you weren't expecting. This was one of those.

I had been asked to speak at Samy's, here in Los Angeles, on the subject of Godox lighting — a perfectly cheerful evening of light shaping and the usual debates about modifiers, where two photographers can disagree for an hour and both be right. When it was over a gentleman came up, introduced himself, and put a card in my hand. Edward Goldstein. He mentioned, almost in passing, that he did some modelling.

There are sitters who arrive carrying their work in their face before they've said a word, and Carlo Mendez is one of them. He came into the Main Street studio on a bright Downtown morning, and within a few minutes it was clear this was a man entirely at ease in front of a lens — which, for a photographer, is both a gift and a quiet challenge. Ease can flatten a portrait if you let it. The task becomes finding the moment underneath the comfort.

There's a particular kind of luck in photographing someone you know completely. With Sasha I've now made more portraits than of any other subject I've ever worked with, and these latest frames from the LA studio are some of the ones I keep returning to. The cropped platinum hair, the stacked silver ear pieces, the Adidas track top with its three stripes — there's an austere, almost sculptural confidence to her here that the lighting was built to serve rather than soften.

A brief return to Londonr a small number of private sittings — actor headshots, executive portraiture, and editorial commissions — held at the Farringdon studio. Four days only.

A fine-art counterpoint — the Shakespearean turn.

In the afternoon of the same day, with the same team, we struck the grey and pulled velvet down behind her. The morning had been commercial — clean light, sculpted silhouettes, the architecture of fashion. The afternoon belonged to something else entirely. We had time and a model willing to play, so we made the work I most like to make: fine art, theatrical, painterly, indebted to the canvas before the camera.

Ben Palacios came through the Downtown Los Angeles studio last week, as part of an ongoing refresh of the actor look book — a deliberate evolution of lighting, styling and approach intended to give clients the distinction casting directors are now demanding.

The news from Westminster this week confirms what many in the Labour movement have suspected for some time. Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, has been cleared by Labour's National Executive Committee to contest the Makerfield by-election — the seat vacated by Josh Simons — with a view to challenging Sir Keir Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party.

I'll be back at the Midtown Manhattan studio from Monday 25th to Sunday 31st May 2026 — seven days, one room, a short list of sittings, and what I suspect will be a faintly absurd amount of coffee. If you've been meaning to book a portrait, refresh a headshot, or sit down for a one-to-one workshop, this is the window.

On Saturday 23rd May 2026, from 10am to 3pm, I'll be running a one-day portrait workshop at the Downtown LA studio on Recreating Caravaggio. Five hours, two lights, professional models, and a small enough room that nobody can hide at the back. Tickets are $450, places are limited, and the date is closer than the calendar makes it look.