Rory Lewis
I was delighted to be invited by B&H Photo to give a lecture at their New York home. In it I talked through some of the portraits that matter most to me. These include the ones people know best, and a few that hold a quieter place in the archive. The full talk is now on their YouTube channel, and you can watch it here.
Read MoreSir Patrick Stewart died on Wednesday, 28 October 2026, in Los Angeles. He was 86.
I heard the news this morning and went straight to the archive. I wanted to look at him again the way I saw him through the lens: still, unguarded, and entirely present. Some sitters perform for the camera. Patrick simply arrived, and let the light do the rest.
Read MoreRory Lewis is now available in San Francisco and the Bay Area for corporate and executive commissions
Over twenty-three years I have photographed a reigning monarch, five British Prime Ministers, and some of the most closely watched figures in global finance, among them Ray Dalio.
Read MoreCinematic Portraiture in the Old Master Tradition
Light is the story
On Sunday 1 November, I’m teaching a two-hour live masterclass on Zoom: Cinematic Portraiture in the Old Master Tradition.
Read MoreIt is a private Telegram group, open only to people who have taken a workshop or one-to-one tuition with me. It is not a general photography forum. Nobody posts their holiday snaps or argues about camera brands. Everyone in it has stood in the studio, worked with the same principles and speaks the same language.
Read MoreGraham’s new series, Nocturne, makes its global debut on Friday, October 30, 2026 with the first two episodes, with new episodes every Friday through December 25 on Apple TV. Originally titled Lazarus, the 10-episode drama was written by Rowan Joffe and John Hlavin and also stars Liev Schreiber and Zazie Beetz. Schreiber plays Jonah Lynn, a former soldier turned homicide detective who leaves Philadelphia for a quiet life in a small Western Pennsylvania town, only for the town and his family to come under attack from the serial killer Jurek Walter, played by Graham
Read MoreIn August I wrote that September could well be my last New York dates of the year. It wasn’t. Four more days have opened in early November, Thursday the 5th to Sunday the 8th, and I’m giving them to actors.
The timing is good. Images made now are proofed, retouched and on your profiles well before the new year, when casting picks up again and every office in the city wants to see something current. It is also the last clear window before the holidays take over the calendar.
Read MoreA return sitting at the Downtown Los Angeles studio, and the case for every actor owning a villain.
Chauncey Alan has played Caesar. This time he came back to the Los Angeles studio wanting to be Cassius.
Not literally, but the brief was close. Chauncey needed a villainous headshot for his castings: one image that tells a casting director, in the half-second a thumbnail gets, that he can be trusted with the man nobody should trust. Shakespeare gave Caesar the line that describes exactly what we were after: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; / He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”
Read MoreFrom Monday 16 to Thursday 26 November I’ll be back at the Farringdon studio. London visits have a way of filling quickly, so I wanted to set out plainly what the diary has room for this time: headshots and portraits for individuals, executive and C-suite sittings, military portraiture, formal and royal commissions, and a small number of one-to-one tuition sessions for photographers who want to learn how this kind of light is made.
Read MoreSome faces arrive at the studio already halfway to a painting. Devin McElvogue walked into the Downtown Los Angeles studio with a head of tight copper curls, a red beard, and a pair of hazel eyes that, under the right light, turn almost amber. A gift for a portrait photographer, but also a responsibility: when a sitter’s colouring is this distinctive, the headshot has to render it truthfully. Casting directors are not booking an idea of a redhead. They are booking Devin.
Read MorePeople sometimes ask me why an actor should sit for a headshot with a portrait photographer rather than a headshot photographer. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that the distinction shouldn't exist. A headshot is a portrait — it is simply a portrait with a job to do. It has to walk into a casting director's inbox at nine in the morning, sit alongside three hundred others, and make somebody stop scrolling. That is not achieved with a white seamless and a ring light. It is achieved by looking properly at a face, understanding what it does, and lighting it the way the old masters lit theirs: with intent.
Read MoreLast week Clancy Brown came to the Downtown Los Angeles studio, and I finally had the chance to build a picture I have been carrying around in my head for some time: a man at a table, with bread and wine and fruit in front of him, lit the way the Old Masters lit their suppers.
Read MoreSome weeks stay with you. This one, at the United Nations in New York, is among them.
During this year's General Assembly I had the privilege of photographing two leaders I have had the honour of sitting before my camera in the past: His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Andy Burnham.
Read MoreI'm delighted to be back at my Midtown Manhattan studio from Thursday 5 to Saturday 7 November, with a limited number of sessions available across three days.
Read MoreI am very grateful to All About Photo, and to its founder and director Sandrine Hermand-Grisel, for featuring my work in an interview published this month.
Read MoreTwo 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.
Read MoreThere is a particular pleasure in photographing an actor who has spent time in the eighteenth century. Tom Connolly leads the feature film Love, Courage and the Battle of Bushy Run as Colonel Henry Bouquet, the Swiss-born British Army officer whose victory at Bushy Run opened the road to the relief of Fort Pitt. The battle was fought, as it happens, in the first week of August, two hundred and sixty-three years ago this month.
Read MoreThere is a particular kind of face the camera waits for. Not the arranged one, not the face that performs readiness the moment a lens appears, but the one that carries a thought behind the eyes and lets you watch it move. Michael DelaFlor brought exactly that into my New York studio, and it made the work a pleasure.
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