Richard Learoyd

Richard Learoyd creates photographs in a defiantly analogue way. Using a hand-built, room-sized camera obscura, Learoyd captures images on immense photographic paper bypassing the need to enlarge a negative, resulting in finely detailed, grainless images. Learoyd’s antiquarian photographic process imbues his images with a historic quality, extended through his compositions; his subjects – figures in isolation, or carefully composed still-lifes – are rendered with a luminous lustre and detailed fragility reminiscent of oil paintings from the Dutch Golden-Age. 

Learoyd was born in Nelson, UK in 1966. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and worked as a teacher and commercial photographer for many years. Selected publications include Richard Learoyd (Fundación MAPFRE / Fraenkel Gallery, 2019); Richard Learoyd: Day for Night (Aperture; Pier 24 Photography, 2015); and The Plot Thickens (Fraenkel Gallery, 2014). Learoyd has had numerous exhibitions internationally, including solo retrospectives at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, in 2016, and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2015. Learoyd’s work is included in the permanent collections of Tate, London, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others.

Learoyd lives and works in London.