About

Disphotic – From greek, meaning unilluminated or poorly lit.

I’m a born and bred south Londoner with a rather contradictory penchant for seemingly objective documentary photography and highly subjective photomontage. I grew up surrounded by art and cinema but in a moment of teenage rebellion opted to study History at university rather than following my parents down the visual arts path. Straight out of university I went to work in Geneva for the United Nations, helping to refine and improve the strategies that countries use to steer their response to HIV/AIDS. Returning to the UK I worked for the National Health Service for a period before deciding to pack it in for the life of a freelance (i.e often unemployed) photographer. I am now studying for a masters degree in photojournalism and documentary photography at the London College of Communication.

Six months after my undergraduate degree ended I realised that I had written barely anything since my finals, and so I started this blog to have a reason to write regularly, and also to encourage me to keep thinking about photography even when I didn’t necessarily have the time or the opportunities to be out and about with a camera. Photography is an intellectual activity as much as a practical craft, and some of the most important stages of it happen when you try to tease out exactly what it is you’re trying to achieve when you come to taking a photograph. I think it was Don McCullin who said you can’t just take photographs like a machine, you have to really invest intellectually and emotionally in your work.

Ultimately I want to develop an approach to documentary photography that combines traditional still image capture with practices from other disciplines, for example oral history. I’m also interested in the exploring ways of combining media to tell stories, mixing stills, text, video, and audio or presenting these media in unconventional ways, for example reworking documentary images into collages or photomontages or using image slideshows that exploit narrative and editing techniques more often used in cinema. Lastly I’d like to develop a style of working that involves a high degree of collaboration with my subjects.

For a chat, questions, commissions, etc contact me at

lewisbush88[at]gmail.com

Or through

www.lewisbush.com

www.flickr.com/lewisbush