“Man with octopus tattoo II”, 2011. Richard Learoyd (English, born 1966). Cibachrome print. Wilson Centre for Photography © Richard Learoyd, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Getty Museum presents ‘Richard Learoyd: In the Studio’ ‘Richard Learoyd: In the Studio’, on view August 30 – November 27, 2016 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center presents Learoyd’s extraordinary photographs by focusing on the artist’s favored subjects: figure studies, intimate portraits, and still lifes.]]>
Source: J. Paul Getty Museum
For more than a decade, Richard Learoyd (English, born 1966) has been using a room-sized camera obscura in his studio to create large-scale prints characterized by mesmerizing detail and lush color. Eschewing digital technologies, Learoyd’s labor-intensive process, using a dark chamber fitted with a lens, sensitized paper, and an external light source, resembles the technique associated with the first photographs made in the 1830s. Yet, in their large scale and striking imagery, Learoyd’s compositions are startlingly contemporary.
For Learoyd, the studio is a place where he is free to experiment with various subjects and to refine ideas that are realized in front of the camera. After arranging a scene in his studio, Learoyd enters the camera and affixes a large sheet of sensitized paper onto the wall opposite the lens. Once exposed, the paper is fed into a color-processing machine attached to the camera, a task that takes about 20 minutes. Since the resulting image is not enlarged from a negative or transparency, each photograph is one-of-a-kind and exceptionally sharp.
“Richard Learoyd’s work nicely complements and engages with the Getty’s renowned collection of nineteenth-century photography, as the process he employs to capture an image is based on one of the oldest methods employed by those pioneering figures,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Contemporary photography is at a very interesting juncture in its history where, after a century of aspiring to be ever more ‘modern’ in both aesthetic and technical terms, it has rediscovered and reconnected with its roots, while losing none of its innovative vigor. Learoyd is one of the most interesting and compelling practitioners of this phenomenon.”
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