Lewis K. Bush 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”.
These particular pieces are from his body of work ‘Metropole’. Bush has described it as ‘A composite of dozens of walks through the city of London, using it’s changing architecture as a metaphor for the city’s growing inequalities.’ Bush has used double exposure to layer buildings on buildings, which has created effects of disorientation in terms of scale, perspective and orientation. ‘Metropole’ has a dark purpose behind resembling London, through its transformation into a ‘new empire’. His work is taken from the perspective of a citizen, comparing the new and progressing buildings and high rises with capitalism. He particularly relates to the idea of Globalized Capitalism, bringing forward concern of the new dominant ideology taking over western societies, thus the progression of threat that increases throughout his book.
At the beginning of this project, all students in the photography department met at The Societe Jersiaise. We listened to presentations about the master plan for the Future of St. Helier and the plans for construction. That was followed up by a presentation from Lewis Bush describing his work of ‘Metropole’ and its relation to the new construction of St. Helier. What I took away from his presentation was new ideas of editing and how I could make my project more interesting for me. I like the idea of cutting up images and layering them, and using double exposure to create something more abstract and unrecognizable. However, my project is based on exploring with people and community in St. Helier. I wold like to explore cutting up images of people and enhancing features of a person that describes more about an individual in a snapshot.
