ART CITIES:N.York-Richard Learoyd
Richard Learoyd’s color images are made with one of the most antiquarian of photographic processes: the camera obscura. Learoyd has created a room-sized camera in which the photographic paper is exposed. The result is an entirely grainless image. The overall sense of these larger-than-life images redefines the photographic illusion. His black-and-white gelatin silver contact prints are made using the negative/positive process invented roughly 170 years ago.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace/MacGill Gallery Archive
Working with a large and portable camera obscura of his own construction, Richard Learoyd has journeyed outside of his London studio, into the art-historically rich English countryside, producing images that have long been latent in his imagination. The negatives are up to 2 meters wide, resulting in the largest gelatin-silver contact prints ever made. In his solo exhibition at Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York, the artist presents his large-scale color and black-and-white photographs made over the last decade, featuring a selection of portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Learoyd began experimenting with the camera obscura during his post-graduate year, refining his practice in 2003 with the creation of a room-sized camera in which light-sensitive photographic paper is exposed. As light falling on the subject is recorded directly onto a sheet of Ilfochrome paper, the resulting hyper-real image is entirely grainless and acutely detailed, though shallow in depth of field. The artist says “The pictures are about extending the duration of looking. I want them to frustrate our desire to instantly understand a photographic representation of a person. My hope is that they inspire a truly reflective view: a view of intimacy and understanding, an insight into another that will increase our humanity”. While Learoyd’s pictures are both technically admirable and transcendently beautiful, it is ultimately their emotive sensations that linger beyond the viewing experience. His work occupies a unique place within the practice of contemporary photography, employing anachronistic production techniques, borrowing from the aesthetics of the finest figurative painters of the 19th and 20th Centuries, and drawing upon the longstanding tradition of imagery. Despite their art historical relevance, however, Learoyd’s photographs evoke a timeless quality and remain universally resonant.
Info: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, Duration 1-30/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com
