Flesh And Bone: Unique Photographs by Richard Learoyd

Aperture Magazine, Summer 2010, Issue 199

Interview of Richard Learoyd by Peggy Roalf

” When you first encounter Richard Learoyd’s beyond-life-size portraits, mainly of unconventionally beautiful women, you sense that the passage of time is expressed by their stillness: the repose through which they convey the powers they exert. The thing about his photographs that makes looking at them exciting, and somewhat unsettling, is that they provoke an escape from rational thought. The sensuous landscape of flesh, the eyes clear as glacial pools, are so immediate and involving that all one can do is to look, and look again. Time, motion, speed-some of photography’s attributes that are enhanced by the effect of a frame, and that often distance this medium from painting-are absent. But the massive scale and surface quality of Learoyd’s portraits share features with both the painting and the photography of nineteenth-century France; they have an intentionality that is imposed by the maker rather than received from the sitter. This is why his photographs invoke the sublime.”

quote by Peggy Roalf

WHAT, I say again, WHAT! Ok, first I want to define sublime.

sub·lime adj

1. so awe-inspiringly beautiful as to seem almost heavenly

2. of the highest moral or spiritual value

3. excellent or particularly impressive (informal)

4. complete or utter

I am assuming that in the case of these portraits, size does matter, because when I view these portraits in Aperture magazine they simply look like good portrait shots; certainly not sublime. Interestingly, Ms. Roalf describes Learoyd’s work as “mainly of unconventionally beautiful women.” She decided to overlook the portrait of a naked man with a penis piercing. When I think of mangled genitals, the concept of sublime doesn’t spring immediately forth, though to be fair, I do find the imagery compelling to some degree, but certainly not sublime.