Richard Learoyd valuation
Makes unique colour photographs in a camera the size of a room, exposed straight onto paper with no negative at all.
Richard Learoyd was born in Nelson, Lancashire, in 1966 and studied fine art photography at the Glasgow School of Art under Thomas Joshua Cooper, graduating in 1990.
What a work by Richard Learoyd is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Richard Learoyd was born in Nelson, Lancashire, in 1966 and studied fine art photography at the Glasgow School of Art under Thomas Joshua Cooper, graduating in 1990. He taught photography and then worked as a commercial photographer in London before, in 2003, beginning to make his own work with a camera obscura: a room-sized camera of two chambers and a fixed lens, which projects the image of a sitter or an object directly onto a sheet of light-sensitive Ilfochrome paper pinned to the back wall. With no negative and no enlargement the prints are grainless and extraordinarily detailed, with a very shallow plane of focus, and each one is unique. His subjects are portraits, often of the same few sitters, nudes, still lifes and objects, held with a stillness closer to painting than to photography. The V&A showed Dark Mirror in 2015, and the Getty Museum gave him a survey in 2016 that travelled to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
The camera obscura colour prints are unique, on a glossy dye-destruction paper whose surface marks and scratches easily and which should be kept from strong light, so condition and framing are central, and a print should not have been taken out of its mount. He also makes black-and-white gelatin silver contact prints from very large negatives. Provenance through his galleries, Fraenkel Gallery and Pace among them, is what a buyer looks for.
Nelson, Glasgow and the camera obscura
His black-and-white contact prints are made from negatives up to eighty inches wide, among the largest gelatin silver contact prints ever made.
His camera obscura work was first exhibited in London in 2007, and it is in the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou and Tate.
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