Schedule and Fee

5-6:30pm Fri 7 June
At The Library Project

Book Your Place Now →
If you have booked a place on Open Source Research Methods with Lewis Bush, this event is included in the booking.

Who is this for?

This talk is aimed photographers, visual artists, and researchers of all levels.

Description

The talk will be an introduction to Lewis Bush’s work as a photographer and the working methods he used. In it Bush will discuss his interest in power as a subject, the challenges of exploring it, and the methods he has used to do it. Bush will discuss three of his projects in the course of the talk; Metropole which documented the transformation of London by property developers, Shadows of the State which uncovers the hidden landscape of intelligence gathering, and Wv.B which reveals the dark origins of space exploration.

Mentor

Lewis Bush works across media and platforms to visualise forms of contemporary power. Born in London, he studied history, worked as a researcher for the United Nations, and then studied documentary photography before starting to develop his own projects from 2012.

His works explore different forms of contemporary power and in particular is concerned with the ways that they interact. These have included projects on the destructive impact of property speculation and redevelopment on his home city of London, to the systemic inequalities of the art world. Recent projects include Shadows of the State, which examines the democratic deficit of intelligence gathering, and Trading Zones which focuses on offshore finance. Bush’s projects have been shortlisted for commendations including the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award 2017, the Luma Rencontres d’Arles Dummy Book Award 2018, 2016 and 2015, the Photo España book award 2016, and the Bar Tur Photobook Award 2015 and 2014.

Bush has written extensively on photography for a range of print and web titles and between 2011 and 2016 he ran Disphotic, a blog on photography and visual culture. He has curated numerous exhibitions including Media & Myth (Format Festival, 2015), Very Now (London College of Communication, 2016), and It’s Gonna be Great (Copeland Gallery, 2017). Bush is lecturer on the MA and BA (Hons) Photojournalism and Documentary Photography courses at London College of Communication, and a visiting tutor at other institutions.

About the Critical Academy

The Critical Academy opens up a new radical space where to learn, research and examine contemporary art practices around Photography and their contexts, as much as the arts management and cultural policy that affects them. The academy has been created by PhotoIreland Foundation in a bid to develop an educational space outside the traditional institutions where practitioners and theorists can gather to experiment and challenge contemporary ideas that affect their practice.

The Critical Academy offers a number of opportunities to actively participate in its programme, aiming at times at very specific backgrounds, with three main components: a new educational space for Seminars; group Research on key projects; professional Development and Support programmes for artists and Arts administrators.

The Critical Academy is a project by PhotoIreland Foundation. Find out more at edu.photoireland.org