Richard Learoyd - The magic of the camera obscura

Sunday 13 October 2019, 13:31 by Michelle Peeters | 5,057 views | 2 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

How often do you take a selfie or a snapshot of someone else with your phone? In today's digital age, a portrait can be made in a fraction of a second, and you can keep clicking until you have the perfect photo.

Photographer Richard Learoyd (Nelson, United Kingdom, 1966) uses his homemade camera obscura to create life-size portraits with a long exposure. In deep concentration, he looks for the right composition before allowing the light to enter and conjure the image on the light-sensitive paper.

His models remain still for all that time, as was also the case in early photography. There is no negative either. This means that, just as in painting, each photo is a unique work. In collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Fotomuseum Den Haag presents Learoyd's portraits, landscapes and still lifes in his first major solo exhibition in the Netherlands.

The magic of the camera obscura

Richard Learoyd uses the original form of photography: the camera obscura. The earliest examples of the camera obscura, literally translated as dark room, date back to classical antiquity.

It is a physical optical phenomenon in which light entering through a small opening in the wall of a completely dark space creates an upside-down projection on the opposite wall of what is happening outside the dark space.

From the sixteenth century onwards, artists presumably used this phenomenon as an aid for translating reality onto canvas. When the pioneers of photography, Niépce, Daguerre and Talbot, managed to fix a projection in a camera onto a light-sensitive plate during successful experiments in the nineteenth century, photography was born.

Slow photography

Richard Learoyd built his enormous camera obscura himself. In his London studio, the camera obscura is a room within a room. Because of the size of the paper he can expose in it, the photos are often life-size or even larger.

He uses this method to make not only portraits and still lifes, but also landscape photos. For these, he sets up his camera obscura outdoors, whether in the English countryside, on the Californian coast or in Eastern Europe.

The process is extremely time-consuming, both in terms of the exposure and the preparation. It is therefore not surprising that he makes only around ten photos a year. Despite using such an ancient method, Learoyd's work has nothing to do with nostalgia.

By using a 750 mm lens in the opening of his camera obscura, he enlarges the image so far that it goes beyond what the human eye can see. The result is photos with a high degree of intensity, a shallow depth of field and no grain at all.

Affinity with painting

In many respects, Learoyd shows himself to be indebted to painting. Not only because of the uniqueness and size of the work, or the slow working method, but also because of his choice of subjects. It is no coincidence that he focuses on the traditional genres of painting: landscape, portrait and still life.

He also comes close to painting through the way he works with light, depicts human skin and seeks stillness in his images. He does this not only in his portraits, such as Jasmijn, towards the light, in which he portrays Anne Frank as a contemporary adult woman, but also, for example, in his 'portraits' of car wrecks.

Biography

Richard Learoyd studied Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art. He worked as a photography teacher and a commercial photographer before increasingly focusing on personal work. In 2007, he first showed his personal work made with a camera obscura at the Union Gallery in London.

In 2015, he had his first major solo exhibition, Dark Mirror, at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Learoyd's work can now be found in renowned collections. Loans for this exhibition come from, among others, Centre Pompidou, Yale University and MoMA.

The exhibition Richard Learoyd - The magic of the camera obscura comprises around 50 portraits, landscapes and still lifes from the most recent decade of Learoyd's oeuvre. The exhibition can be seen at Fotomuseum Den Haag from 5 October to 5 January 2020.

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