Inside Richard Learoyd’s studio

By Jonathan Griffin

“Not Day, Not Night” is the title that Richard Learoyd, a British photographer, chose for an ongoing series of weighty books – albums, really – compiling his pictures. The title precisely describes the aesthetic of his new exhibition, “In The Studio”, at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. It shows a series of dimly lit photographs, evoking the thresholds of dawn or dusk, his subjects isolated against blank backgrounds in the studio with no intimation of a world outside.

The cool, crepuscular tone of Learoyd’s photographs is ironic. His pictures are made with a room-sized camera obscura inside which a large piece of photographic paper is exposed and developed: a unique record of the figure in front of the lens. In order for exposure times to be manageably short, Learoyd’s models are illuminated with very bright – and hot – flashbulbs.