Richard Learoyd, Exhibition, Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona: 5 June-5 September 2019

How can an extremely realist picture appear so mysterious and enigmatic? Photographer Richard Learoyd is known for his skill in combining these two features which seem so incompatible.

Richard Learoyd’s colour images are made with one of the oldest of photographic processes invented roughly 170 years ago by Englishman W. H. Fox Talbot, the camera obscura. The Latin translation is “dark room,” and Learoyd has created a room-sized camera in which the photographic paper is exposed. The subject, usually a person, 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 an entirely grainless image.

His method leads to an extremely clear and detailed result, so that the final outcome could be compared to 18th and 19th century European painting due to the incredible abundance of details and realism, so accurate that it sometimes turns out to be disturbing. The details that the visitor sees are very intimate, and they give the picture a strong visual impact which can be placed between magnetism and a sense of unease.

Paradoxically, even if you have the chance to inspect every single detail  of the subjects in front of you, the subjects portrayed will still look detached and uninvolved. It is this aspect that the photographer wants to demonstrate with his shoots: an unbridgeable distance exists between people, and no matter how close you move, there will always be a gap, small but inseparable, that will keep you divided: “My portraits question the viewer’s capability to really know someone. We often would like to blend with others, but something always stands in the way; in this case it is the photo’s surface”.

Fundaciòn Mapfre

Carrer de la Diputació, 250, 08007