Richard Learoyd: New Work
Richard Learoyd is a British artist, whose unique analogue approach stands apart from the digital emphasis of the contemporary photographic landscape. After studying under landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper at Glasgow School of Art, Learoyd decided to turn away from pursuing his subjects outdoors, instead constructing compositions within the confines of his studio. He built his first camera in 2004, before installing a 50” Ilfochrome machine the following year which completely filled his workspace. Learoyd described this shift into the studio as ‘liberating’, as he began to experiment more boldly with his process: ‘I’d crawled through a gap in an overwhelming technology to invent a medium for myself.’
The camera obscura principle which Learoyd used as his starting point is foundational to the oldest forms of photography and was largely abandoned in the 19th century due to its technical limitations. Camera obscura, derived from the Latin for ‘dark room’, works on the basis that an image projected through a small hole in a screen creates a reversed, inverted image on the surface opposite the aperture. Learoyd uses Cibachrome paper, no longer in production, as this receptive surface, so that the dye destruction quality of the paper fixes the image directly in a positive-to-positive transmission, bypassing the need for a negative. The traditional frustrations inherent to this medium – the unwieldiness of vast cameras, the slowness of shooting, the complex, sensitive chemistry of the paper, and the irreproducibility of negativeless prints – provided Learoyd with an impetus against which he began to refine his technique.
Learoyd was initially concerned that the limitations of his materials would prevent him from using his cameras to capture portraits, and so his first photographs were still-lifes. Learoyd’s work with flower arrangements, dead animals and dark mirrors reflect preoccupations present in the work of painters at whose hands these subjects first attained their canonical status. There is an absorbing clarity to Learoyd’s photography which invites focus to each detail, scaled up in hyperreal dimensionality to bear scrutiny besides Dutch Master painting.
