Thesis

Politicians Are Tricky to Photograph: Lessons from a Career Behind the Lens

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Politicians Are Tricky to Photograph: Lessons from a Career Behind the Lens

Political portraiture is uniquely challenging. Unlike actors or artists who often arrive ready to reveal themselves, political figures carry the weight of office, legacy, and scrutiny. Their public image is choreographed, their private selves carefully protected. To photograph them is to navigate a space where power, perception, and personality intersect, requiring not only technical mastery but also an ability to draw out the humanity beneath the role. Over the years, I have worked with some of the most influential figures in modern public life—Tony Blair, John Major, Theresa May, David Cameron, and more recently Usha Vance, the Second Lady of the United States. Each sitting has presented its own complexities and quiet revelations.

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The Continuum of Command — Capturing Britain’s Field Marshals

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The Continuum of Command — Capturing Britain’s Field Marshals

The year 2025 marks a defining milestone in my career as a portraitist and in the mission of the Rory Lewis Non-Profit: the capture of four living British Field Marshals—an achievement unparalleled in contemporary photographic history. This body of work joins the organization’s latest acquisition, the Presentation Portrait of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig(1928), symbolically uniting the early twentieth-century imagery of command with its living successors nearly a century later.

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The Color of Money — Ray Dalio as the New Adam Smith

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The Color of Money — Ray Dalio as the New Adam Smith

In The Color of Money, Rory Lewis reimagines Ray Dalio as a modern-day Adam Smith — a philosopher of finance rendered in the tonal language of U.S. currency. The portrait’s subdued greenish hue evokes the moral and material weight of money, while its Caravaggio-inspired lighting captures Dalio suspended between shadow and illumination — intellect and introspection. Symbolizing a new era of economic thought, the image reflects Dalio’s 2022 reversal, “I no longer think cash is trash,” portraying him not merely as an investor, but as a thinker reshaping capitalism’s conscience. Blending fine art with corporate gravitas, the work positions Lewis at the intersection of aesthetic mastery and financial portraiture for the Fortune 500 age.

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At the Duke’s Desk: A Living Tradition of Command

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At the Duke’s Desk: A Living Tradition of Command

Rory Lewis Non-Profit presents a visual thesis uniting portraits of the last three Commanders of the Household Division — Lieutenant General Sir Ben Bathurst, Major General Sir Chris Ghika, and Major General James Bowder — each photographed at the historic Duke of Wellington’s desk inside Horse Guards, London.

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