Presences

It’s hard not to feel like an overzealous dermatologist examining the subjects of Richard Learoyd’s exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery. His large-scale direct-positive images reveal a degree of epidermal detail one usually only gets to see while making out under an interrogation lamp. The shallow depth of field that marks Learoyd’s portraits and that shows imperfections with pitiless clarity—a rough patch here, an incipient pimple there, weirdly dilated pupils—somewhat mitigates the monumental quality lent them by the size of the images and the solid, sometimes brilliant hues he clothes his models in (when he clothes them).

Humanizing them further are the ambivalent expressions they assume, or rather, seem to be caught in. Unsmiling and makeup-less, their faces are not merely neutral, as for a formal portrait. The effect, and it is unsettling, is that of catching them lost in thoughts one was not invited to observe and perhaps should be embarrassed to witness. Learoyd’s portraits reveal how much can be evoked by so little: in Rachel (2009), the hint of a furrow tensing the brow over staring eyes and the dejected droop of the lips, seen at this scale and in such detail, might make one think twice about sitting next to this woman on the bus. The subject in Tatiana in Red (2010) slouches in a chair, her right arm wrapped against her torso and gripping her left elbow in that instinctive gesture of self-protection. Her gaze is fixed on the floor. She is a study in sadness, achingly lovely, and shares with the other subjects here the apparent presumption of privacy. Of course this is an illusion, as these are laboriously staged portraits: Learoyd uses a nineteenth-century technique in which the subject occupies a room with a powerful light source, connected by a lens to the camera obscura adjacent, wherein the image is projected directly onto the photographic paper.

While Learoyd's images evoke Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (1662-63) in their quality of overcast light

Nancy Nude in White Chair, 2010; unique camera obscura Ilfochrome photograph; 58 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

and the privileged glimpse they seem to impart into the quiet, ordinary, secret lives of women, the private moments he depicts are entirely interior, and thus more voyeuristic. The very ambiguity of the private thoughts exposed to this trespass allow one to project one’s own secrets, one’s own sadnesses, onto the subjects and to imagine oneself, utterly vulnerable in those moments of naked introspection, being scrutinized by strangers who sip wine and remark on one’s pimples before hopping on to the next gallery.

Presences is on view at Fraenkel Gallery, in San Francisco, through June 25, 2011. 

Larissa Archer is a writer, an actor, and a theatre director living in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in The Times, New York Moves, Sublime, TheGloss.com, and others.