I am back in New York on Thursday 17 and Friday 18 September, working out of Young Studio at 580 8th Avenue, on the twentieth floor. Two days of sittings in Midtown.
New York headshots and portraits, 17 and 18 September 2026 (Rory Lewis Maye Musk New York 2026)
I have photographed in this city since 2014, and the pattern is always the same. Actors come in the morning with two changes of clothing and a casting they are preparing for. Executives come at lunchtime, having walked over from an office a few blocks away. In the late afternoon somebody arrives who wants a portrait rather than a headshot, and those are often the sittings I remember longest.
The light
The whole method, and it has not changed in twenty-five years. The reason is historical rather than technical. Holbein, Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Lawrence all worked with a single window or a single lamp, and they understood that shadow is not an absence but a structure. A face lit from one side has a geometry to it. A face lit from four sides has none, which is why the standard corporate headshot — evenly lit, white background, everybody identical — tells you nothing about the person in it.
My backgrounds are dark. My shadows are deep and I leave them alone. The work sits in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London and in the Royal Collection, and it looks the same in a casting director's inbox as it does on a gallery wall, because I do not make two kinds of picture.
Who these two days are for
Actors. Theatrical and commercial looks, shot to work as thumbnails on Casting Networks and Actors Access while still holding up printed at ten by eight. New York casting has its own visual grammar and I have shot enough of it now to know what a New York agent wants to see and what will get an actor passed over.
Executives and professionals. Founders, partners, fund principals, board members. I photograph people who are photographed rarely and who dislike being photographed, and the sitting is built around that. Ray Dalio sat for me. Five British Prime Ministers have sat for me, including Tony Blair and Theresa May, along with Field Marshals of the British Army, His Majesty The King of Jordan, and HRH The Duke of Kent. A managing partner who is nervous about a leadership page is not a difficult sitter by comparison.
