Exclusive Interview with 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 has photographed five British Prime Ministers, members of the British Royal Family and, in July 2026, His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan. Seven of his portraits are held by the National Portrait Gallery, London, and sixteen by the Royal Collection. Alongside his fine-art series Selah, whose sitters include Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench, runs two decades of military portraiture: Soldiery, exhibited at the National Army Museum, and now Soldiers of the Republic, made with the Italian Army. He works from studios in Los Angeles, New York and London.

We asked him a few questions:

All About Photo: What first drew you to the world of photography?

Rory Lewis: History, not photography. I read Medieval History at King's College London and spent more time in the National Gallery than in the library. What held me were the portraits. Holbein's drawings of the Tudor court are so exact you feel you could be introduced to the sitter. Titian. Later Rembrandt, who seems to paint the person thinking. I wanted to make records like that, and the camera was the only instrument a historian could pick up and use to make primary sources rather than read them.

So I came to the medium backwards. I knew what a portrait should do before I knew what a lens did. The technique has been a long effort to catch up with pictures I had already seen in my head, painted four hundred years earlier.

Your biography says your work carries the language of the Old Masters into the present. On the day of a sitting, what does that mean in practice?

It means one light. Low, off to one side, and nothing to fill the shadows. That is not a style so much as a discipline the painters were forced into: a single window, north light, a dark room. Caravaggio and Ribera made darkness do half the work, and the constraint is exactly what makes their figures feel carved rather than described.

The rest is restraint. A plain ground, very few props, and as little apparatus as I can manage, because the drama should come from the face and never from the equipment. I want the sitter to feel they have walked into a room, not onto a set. If the light is right before they arrive, I can give my attention to the person rather than the exposure, and that is usually the difference between a photograph and a portrait.

Your first portrait to enter the National Portrait Gallery was of the actor David Warner, made in 2013, his first sitting since Cecil Beaton photographed him in the 1960s. What did that sitting teach you?

That the sitter's trust is the whole picture. David had not sat for a photographer in decades, and Beaton is not a name you follow lightly. The only honest response to a name like that is to do less: one light, a dark ground, and a man allowed to be exactly his age.

When the Gallery acquired the portrait I understood for the first time what I was for. A portrait is a small act of record. It has to be good enough to be looked at by people who never met the sitter and who will not care what the photographer was feeling. That standard has not moved since, and I try to hold to it whether the person in the chair is a Field Marshal or a friend.

Selah is the fine-art heart of your practice: Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Judi Dench, held in deep tenebrist light. What is the series, and why the Counter-Reformation?

Selah is the word that punctuates the Psalms. Nobody is entirely sure what it means, but the best guess is a pause, a stop for breath. That is what I ask of the sitters: to stop performing for a moment.

The Counter-Reformation painters used darkness to make the human figure urgent. Caravaggio above all, Ribera, and later the engravers, Doré. Take away the room and the costume and the anecdote, and what remains is presence. For actors of that calibre, who have spent a lifetime being looked at, it is a strange and I think welcome instruction: nothing is required of you. I would add David Lynch to the lineage, because he understood better than anyone in the last century that the dark around a face is where the viewer's imagination goes to work.

The Andy Serkis portrait belongs to the same argument. The gold mask is not a prop. His whole art is transformation, Gollum and Caesar and Kong, and the mask reaches back through commedia dell'arte to Greek theatre. It says: here is a man who has spent his life letting his face be replaced, and here is the face.

You have photographed five British Prime Ministers: Sir John Major, Sir Tony Blair, Lord Cameron, Baroness May, and now Andy Burnham. What is it like to photograph political power?

Politicians are the most photographed and least seen people in the country. They exist in a thousand frames a week, almost all of them made in a hurry by someone who wants a moment. I want the opposite of a moment. I want the version of the face that will still make sense in a hundred years, when the news has gone.

So I photograph them all the same way: the same light, the same plain ground, the same quiet. If every Prime Minister is lit identically, then the differences between them are theirs and not mine, and the series becomes something a historian can use. That is the intention: a complete run of living Prime Ministers made in one hand, which I intend to present to the National Portrait Gallery.

Andy Burnham is the happy accident. I photographed him in Manchester in 2021, when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester. In July this year he walked into Downing Street. The archive was ahead of the news, which is the only race a portrait photographer should ever try to win.

In July 2026 you photographed His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan. Tell us about that sitting.

It lasted barely a minute. That is not a complaint; it is the condition of the work at that level. A head of state gives you a window, and the window is the window. There is no second attempt.

What it means is that the portrait has to be finished before the sitter enters the room. The light is set and tested on a stand-in, the exposure fixed, the frame composed, the ground decided. When His Majesty walked in, he walked into a photograph that already existed and lacked only him. My job in that minute was to say almost nothing and to see.

I had the advantage of years in similar rooms, with HRH The Duke of Kent, HRH Prince Michael of Kent, and with Field Marshals and General Officers of the British Army. Ceremony and uniform have their own grammar, and the state portrait is an older tradition than photography. Titian did it for Charles V. You are not inventing anything. You are joining a line and trying not to let it down.

Sixteen of your works are held by the Royal Collection, including portraits of the Duke of Kent and Prince Michael of Kent. What does it mean to you to have work at Windsor?

More than I can easily say, for a specific reason. Windsor is where the Holbein drawings live, the studies of the Tudor court that made me want to do this in the first place. Elsewhere in the castle is the Waterloo Chamber, where Thomas Lawrence's portraits of the sovereigns and commanders of the Napoleonic wars hang. Those two rooms are, more or less, my education.

The Duke of Kent sat for me at Kensington Palace in June 2021, in uniform, in a single light. For those portraits to enter the same collection is not a career point; it is the closing of a circle that began in a lecture hall at King's. I offered them as a gift because that is where the pictures belong, and because a portrait should be somewhere it will be looked after for longer than I will be here.

Alongside the royal and political work runs two decades of military portraiture: Soldiery, exhibited at the National Army Museum, and your nonprofit, Heroes in Focus. Why soldiers?

Because the soldier is the most painted and least named figure in Western art. Commanders got the portraits: Titian's emperors, Lawrence's marshals. The private soldier was a shape in the middle distance. Soldiery was an attempt to give the Lance Corporal the Field Marshal's light, the same light and the same care, and to put a name under every face.

Between 2016 and 2017 I photographed nearly a thousand serving British soldiers, from a rifleman of 1st Battalion The Rifles to Field Marshal The Lord Houghton. The National Army Museum exhibited the work and has since acquired more than 150 of the portraits, and the National Portrait Gallery holds my portrait of Warrant Officer Class 2 Deborah Penny.

Heroes in Focus is the structure that makes it possible. Sitters are photographed at no cost to themselves or their regiment; they receive a print; the portrait enters an archive intended for museums and national collections. It is the closest I can come to what the painters had in a patron, except that the patron is the record itself.

This year you have extended that archive to the Italian Army with Soldiers of the Republic. Why Italy, and where does the historian's eye take you there?

Italy is where the light comes from. Caravaggio in Rome, Ribera in Naples: every dark-ground portrait I have made is descended from those two cities, so photographing Italian soldiers in that light felt less like a new project than a homecoming. The regiments help. An officer of the Lancieri di Montebello wears a name that is a battle. A sniper of the Aosta infantry carries a lineage older than the Republic he serves. History is not a metaphor for these men; it is on their collar.

As a historian I also read the twentieth century closely, Soviet graphic design, the Italian 1930s, for what it teaches about how power arranges the human figure to be looked at: the mass, the profile, the monument. You study that vocabulary to understand it, and to know what to refuse. Soldiers of the Republic is the opposite proposition. One face, not a formation. A name, not a symbol. That, for me, is what a portrait is for.

Your studios are in Los Angeles, New York and London, and your recent American sitters include Usha Vance and Maye Musk. Does the work change across the Atlantic?

The light does not change. I think of the three studios as one continuous room. What changes is the sitter's relationship to being looked at. Los Angeles photographs itself all day and is starved of stillness; take the noise away, give someone a single light and silence, and the relief on their face is often the portrait. London sitters tend to arrive apologising. New York sitters arrive with a plan. I try to make all three forget which city they are in.

The American work also reminds me that I brought the method and left the subject matter open. Whether it is Usha Vance, Maye Musk, Ray Dalio or Eric Garcetti, the question is the one I would ask in Farringdon: what will this face look like to someone in 2126, and have I given them enough to go on?

Your most recent published commission is the cover of Reece Shearsmith's memoir, Things I Took from the Dark, out from Quercus in October. You photographed him in strict profile. Why?

Because the profile is the oldest portrait convention there is. Coins, medals, Pisanello, Piero della Francesca's Duke of Urbino: the profile is how power and memory were recorded before anyone thought to turn the head. Reece's book is a memoir told through a lifetime's collection of macabre objects, a museum of himself. A profile is the museum label of a face.

It also suited the studio. My London room is in Bleeding Heart Yard in Farringdon, where Dickens put the Plornishes in Little Dorrit, and the yard has the right atmosphere for a man who collects haunted paintings and mummified mermaids. He was a generous sitter. On a book cover the photographer's job is to be the foundation under the illustrator and the designer, and a strict profile in a single light gives them something solid to build on.

How do you direct a sitter? What happens in the first five minutes?

Very little, deliberately. I keep the room quiet and say less than people expect. I ask them to sit, to look at me, and to think about nothing in particular, which is harder than it sounds and is why it works. The photograph usually happens in the gap between instructions, when the sitter has stopped waiting to be told what to do.

I also make fewer frames than people expect. The discipline of the painter is that every mark is a decision. Digital photography abolished that discipline overnight, and I have spent my career trying to put it back.

You teach internationally, including your masterclass Recreating Caravaggio. What can actually be taught, and what advice would you give a young portrait photographer?

Light can be taught in an afternoon. Looking takes years, and it is the only part that matters. So go to a museum before you buy a second light. Stand in front of a Holbein or a Rembrandt and work out where the window was. Then go home and do it with one lamp.

Beyond that: read history, because a portrait photographer who does not know what portraits have been for is only taking pictures. Photograph old people; the face has arrived, and it will teach you patience. And learn to make a portrait in one minute, because one day the sitter will be a king and one minute is all you will get.

What's next for you?

Soldiers of the Republic continues in Italy through the rest of the year, and the Prime Ministers series moves towards its presentation to Galleries. Things I Took from the Dark is published on 8 October, and I am in London that month for sittings and a one-day masterclass at the Farringdon studio.

In March 2027 I am running a five-day portrait intensive in London built on the idea that the studio should be taught alongside the paintings: days at the camera, and a day in the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery standing in front of the pictures that started all this. Beyond that, the long portrait of public life goes on, a sitting at a time. There is no finishing it. That is rather the point.