Lewis Bush

Lewis K. Bush (born 1988) is a British photographer, writer, curator and educator.

He aims "to draw attention to forms of invisible power that operate in the world", believing that "power is always problematic" because it is inherently "arbitrary and untransparent".

Bush was born in 1988 in London.

He studied history at the University of Warwick and gained a master's degree in documentary photography from London College of Communication (LCC).

He lectures on photojournalism and documentary photography at LCC.

From 2011 to 2016 he wrote and edited a blog about photography, Disphotic. He also written about photography for other publications including The British Journal of Photography, The Art Newspaper, Frieze, and publications by Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and Fotomuseum Antwerp.

Bush's The Memory of History (2012), is about Europe's forgetfulness of its unresolved past and that past's re-emergence, as evidenced in the time of the European debt crisis; The Camera Obscured (2012) is about the absurdity of security guards preventing people from photographing buildings; Metropole (2015) is "an architectural critique on the changing face of London"; War Primer 3 (2013) is a reworking of Broomberg and Chanarin's book War Primer 2; and Shadows of the State (2018) is about numbers stations.

In 2012, for The Memory of History (2012), Bush travelled through ten European Union countries to examine the effects of the European debt crisis, in the context of Europe's turbulent history of crises that are forgotten, only later to resurface.

Bush intends to show that process happening again, where unresolved history is reappearing "with the economic pain of the present", using photographs that show "connections between history and the present".

For The Camera Obscured (2012) he set up a Camera Obscura outside sensitive sites around London and used it to draw them until challenged by security guards.

Bush "attempted to engage these personnel in a discussion about art history, highlighting the blurred boundaries between images made by mechanical means and those drawn by hand, and by doing so demonstrating the absurdity of their objections."

The work is also about "the intersections of art and photography, and the question of where the balance lies between individual rights and collective security."

His War Primer 3 (2013 and 2015) is a reworking of Broomberg and Chanarin's War Primer 2 (2011), itself an appropriation of Bertolt Brecht's pacifist book War Primer (1955).

Brecht's book was a "critique of the relationship between war and photography", using photographs and poems; Bush's ebook, in critiquing Broomberg and Chanarin's book, is about "inequality, labour and capital."

The title recalls a primer, a first textbook for teaching of reading.

His Metropole (2015) zine and corresponding book (2018) is "an architectural critique on the changing face of London", "intended to highlight how large swathes of the city are being developed so quickly that they have become unrecognisable – a move he believes is aggressively wiping out London's history and diversity."

All are self-published apart from Shadows of the State and the 2018 version of Metropole. The Memory of History and Metropole have been shown in solo exhibitions in London.

His Shadows of the State (2018) is a book about numbers stations, that "seeks to visualise, locate and expose many of these stations".

It is about the "line of reasoning [. . . ] that the only way to defend democracy is by having something inherently undemocratic at its core."

Rather than taking photographs, Bush collated write-ups, publicly available satellite imagery, spectrograms and maps.

His book Depravity's Rainbow (2023) is about early rocket development in Nazi Germany including the V-2 ballistic missile and the way that many engineers involved in these projects were recruited by Allied countries after the war and went on to play a major role in post-war rocket development including at NASA during the Apollo project.

The book predominantly focuses on Wernher von Braun.

As well as books, Bush has published around twenty zines containing smaller projects.

For example, during the UK's first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Bush forensically exposed and photographed fingerprints present on goods he bought in shops and online.

The work is about the potential for contamination of consumers with SARS-CoV-2.

It is also about exposing the presence of the usually hidden labourers, vulnerable because of working in distribution at a time of social distancing.