Rory Lewis

Rory Lewis is a British portrait photographer whose work carries the language of the Old Masters into the present day. A historian before he was a photographer — he read Medieval History at King's College London — Lewis came to the camera through painting: Holbein's court portraits, Caravaggio's tenebrism, Rembrandt's candour. Twenty-three years on, that education still governs the work, which he describes simply as capturing history, one portrait at a time.

His sitters span the public life of two continents. He has photographed five British Prime Ministers — Sir John Major, Sir Tony Blair, Lord Cameron, Baroness May and Andy Burnham — and members of the British Royal Family, among them Prince Michael of Kent and the Duke of Kent. In July 2026 he photographed His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan. In America, recent sitters include Usha Vance, Second Lady of the United States, and Maye Musk.

At the fine-art heart of the practice is Selah, an ongoing series conceived in the register of Counter-Reformation painting — single figures held in deep tenebrist light — whose sitters include Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench.

Alongside it runs two decades of military portraiture. Soldiery (2016–17) recorded nearly 1000 serving British soldiers and was exhibited at the National Army Museum, which has since acquired more than 150 of his works. Lewis is the founder of Heroes in Focus, a nonprofit devoted to honouring servicemen and women through fine-art portraiture, and in 2026 he extends the archive to the Italian Army with Soldiers of the Republic.

Seven of his portraits are held by the National Portrait Gallery, London — beginning with his 2013 study of David Warner, the actor's first sitting since Cecil Beaton in the 1960s — and sixteen by the Royal Collection. His work is syndicated worldwide by Contour by Getty Images. He lives in Los Angeles and works from studios there, in New York and in London, and teaches internationally, including his signature masterclass, Recreating Caravaggio.

Statement:

I photograph as the painters I admire painted: one sitter, a dark field, light that sculpts rather than describes. My training was in history, not photography, and I have never really left it — every sitting is, to me, a small act of record. Whether the subject is a soldier, a Prime Minister or an actor, the intention is the same: to set aside performance and ornament until something permanent remains.

The pictures are made simply, with one or two lights in the manner of Caravaggio and Ribera, because the drama should come from the face, not the apparatus. I work between London, New York and Los Angeles and think of the three studios as one continuous room, in which the same long portrait of public life is slowly being made. A portrait can outlive the moment in which it is made. That is the only standard worth working to.