Lewis Bush

Metronom: After studying at the university of Warwick, you worked a consultant researcher for the United Nations. What did you study and how did you come to work with photography?

Lewis Bush: I studied history at Warwick, mostly because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life (who does at eighteen) and history had always been something which had interested me. Doing this gave me three years to explore a lot of different ideas and while I emerged feeling it had been a bit of a diversion, I’m just starting to realise in hindsight how deeply some of those ideas penetrated. In particular ideas about power, who gets to set the record, and what that record consists of.
In terms of photography I had photographed quite a bit during my teens and got a bit more serious about it at Warwick, photographing for the student union, the student paper and a few other things. The time working at the World Health Organisation in Geneva was very interesting, but it also made me realise I wasn’t keen on spending my time behind a desk. A career photography seemed like a good way to avoid this.

M: You write and curate and undertake academic research as well as produce your own multi-media practice with books and prints held in a number of prestigious collections – why do you choose to teach and does it inform your other practices in any way?

LB: If I’m completely honest I drifted into teaching, like so many things in my life, rather by accident. I ran into one of my former tutors one day and he invited me to give a class, that went well and it really just grew from there. Initially I taught because it was work and I thought it was better to be doing that something that involved photography indirectly than something completely unrelated, but over time I’ve come to see how much teaching shapes my ideas, directly and indirectly. Directly in the sense it forces you to constantly learn yourself, to always be open to new ideas and techniques. Indirectly in that all those hours talking over ideas with students causes you to constantly reflect on things. Sometimes a student will ask a question which will force you to rethink something you previously felt was very axiomatic and beyond question, I love that experience.

M: You were and still are the course leader of the entirely online MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication before courses globally were forced to follow suit due to the covid-19 epidemic. Of course, photography in many ways lends itself to digital platforms better than many other mediums but why did you choose to conduct the course entirely online?

LB: I should say the credit for establishing course goes to Paul Lowe who saw in 2008 that there was a space for this sort of online teaching, partly because of changes in technology as you note. The course was very innovative then and I think remains so today although gradually other entirely online MA courses have emerged. My view of online teaching is that it offers a different set of challenges and opportunities to face to face teaching, it’s neither inferior (as some who’ve never experienced it seem to believe) nor innately superior (as some educational technologists would like people to think). Its usefulness depends very much on what you want to do.
In terms of my own agenda, photography, and in particular documentary photography, is a medium with a very problematic, euro-centric slant, dominated for most of it’s history by white middle-class men. One of the things I like about teaching online are the possibilities for addressing this. We have a truly global student cohort, each bringing their own ideas and references from their particular context. And I try very hard in terms of the guests we invite to also echo the global nature of the course. That’s still a work in progress, but it’s one of the things that excites me about this way of teaching.

M: The connectivity is incredibly exciting but in those instances where it’s difficult to understand unfamiliar contexts and visual languages from which work is being made, how do you overcome those challenges to help students develop their projects in a way that’s true to them and what they’re doing?

LB: It can be but again this is also really one of the pleasures of it as well. I hate the idea of the ‘sage on the stage’ model of teaching, or perhaps in our case it would be the ‘sage on the webpage’. I try to be very open with the students that I’m always learning just as they are, and I encourage them to bring their own examples and share them and if necessary, explain them with the rest of the group. I think that works particularly well at MA level where there is a greater sense that we are community of practice, i.e. a group of practitioners united by a shared interest in something, as much as we are teachers and learners. It always depends on the dynamic of each year group but in general I’ve found the students to be really open to this approach.

M: Based on your experience of teaching online, what kind of issues do you and your students encounter when developing material based or multi-media projects?

LB: Well for example books are a big part of my practice, and some of the other tutors are very exhibition orientated or focused on other forms of photography which are very much about the haptic relationship between viewer and material. That can of course be challenging, I can’t bring paper samples to a class to share with my students, but I can tell them where to find their own, and in some ways that might be more useful and more sustainable in the long run. Also, to some extent talking about these things virtually actually echoes the real world more closely than sitting down with physical materials. Most of the books I’ve done with publishers, much of the back and forth about designs and materials has been conducted digitally, likewise for exhibition projects.

M: Bringing the conversation back to teaching more generally. How important is theory and critical writing to your course structures and the way you try to get students to engage with their own work as well as others?

LB: There’s a core history and theory unit which I really enjoy teaching. Our students come from all sorts of educational backgrounds, ranging from having relatively little formal education but perhaps a great deal of practical experience, through to others who have doctorates and other higher qualifications. For some of them, ideas about gendered or orientalist gazes, and so on are familiar and not that challenging, for others they are entirely new, and this part of the course opens up very different ways of thinking about photography and its power. The students also come from a variety of disciplines, some of them might previously have studied related areas like anthropology, others might have a background in the sciences, so our theory sessions sometimes become these amazing melting pots of different ideas.
They each write an essay as part of this unit and in a similar way these essays often end up being a reflection of issues that they are grappling with in their practical work. For me that’s the value of theory, when it signposts solutions to practical problems and questions. Ideally, I think there shouldn’t even be a clear distinction between where theory and practice ends (one of the nicest things a student ever said to me was that he wasn’t sure if my classes were more theory or practice!) While I love discovering new ideas, in a teaching context theory for its own sake often ends up becoming a rather uninspiring, abstract experience.

Lewis Bush works across media and platforms to visualise the activities of powerful agents, organisations, and practices. Since 2012 his practice has explored issues ranging from the aggressive redevelopment of London, to the systemic inequalities of the art world. Recent works include Shadows of the State, which examines the democratic deficit of intelligence gathering, and Wv.B which examines the dark histories of space exploration. Bush has written extensively on photography, and since 2011 he has run the Disphotic blog. He has curated a number of exhibitions and is course leader of MA documentary photography at London College of Communication.

Lewis Bush

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