Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
APERTURE/PIER 24 PHOTOGRAPHY
Richard Learoyd: Day for Night
Text by Richard Learoyd, Martin Barnes, Nancy Gryspeerdt.
This deluxe, oversized monograph offers the most comprehensive collection of British photographer Richard Learoyd's (born 1966) color studio images to date--mostly portraits, but also including a handful of exquisite still lifes. The color images are made with one of the most antiquarian of photographic processes: the camera obscura, literally translated from Latin as "dark room." Learoyd has created a room-sized camera in which the Cibachrome photographic paper is exposed. The subject is in the adjacent room, separated by a lens. Light falling on the subject is directly focused onto the photographic paper without an interposing film negative. The result is a perfectly clear, entirely grainless, larger-than-life image. Learoyd's subjects, composed simply and directly, are described with the thinnest plane of focus, recreating and exaggerating the way that the human eye perceives; the images recall Dutch Master paintings in tone and composition. This volume includes more than 150 images, reproduced with the utmost care to capture the luminosity of the originals. It also includes an artist statement by Learoyd; a statement by Nancy Gryspeerdt, one of his subjects; and a text by Martin Barnes, curator of the first solo exhibition of the artist's work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Featured image is reproduced from Richard Learoyd: Day for Night.
"Richard Learoyd's large-scale portrait and still-life photographs captivate viewers with their quiet power, mesmerizing detail and timeless quality," Victoria and Albert curator Martin Barnes writes in Aperture's exquisitely produced, large-format monograph, Richard Learoyd: Day for Night, published to accompany the current exhibition at the V&A. "Visually, they are bold, poised and magnificently beautiful. The combination of the images' veracity and their impeccable, high-gloss surfaces makes them appear almost hyper-real. Part of the reason for their particular look and appeal resides in the innovative and unconventional production process that Learoyd has perfected. Surprisingly, his work is entirely non-digital and is made with obsolete chemical-based photographic materials. Utilizing a room-sized camera obscura, he captures scenarios constructed in his studio directly onto color photographic paper. His compositions test the limits of photographic representation possible today while reflecting on the medium's heritage, its position within the traditional genres of fine art, and its capacity for symbolic interpretation." Featured image is "Agnes with Eyes Closed" (2007). continue to blog
Published by Aperture/Pier 24 photography. Text by Richard Learoyd, Martin Barnes, Nancy Gryspeerdt.
This deluxe, oversized monograph offers the most comprehensive collection of British photographer Richard Learoyd's (born 1966) color studio images to date--mostly portraits, but also including a handful of exquisite still lifes. The color images are made with one of the most antiquarian of photographic processes: the camera obscura, literally translated from Latin as "dark room." Learoyd has created a room-sized camera in which the Cibachrome photographic paper is exposed. The subject is in the adjacent room, separated by a lens. Light falling on the subject is directly focused onto the photographic paper without an interposing film negative. The result is a perfectly clear, entirely grainless, larger-than-life image. Learoyd's subjects, composed simply and directly, are described with the thinnest plane of focus, recreating and exaggerating the way that the human eye perceives; the images recall Dutch Master paintings in tone and composition.
This volume includes more than 150 images, reproduced with the utmost care to capture the luminosity of the originals. It also includes an artist statement by Learoyd; a statement by Nancy Gryspeerdt, one of his subjects; and a text by Martin Barnes, curator of the first solo exhibition of the artist's work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
