Introducing Lewis Bush – SPIN Research Fellow 2023

Please give a warm welcome to Lewis Bush – SPIN Research Fellow 2023.

Lewis is currently working on an immersive and exciting project – ‘Trading Zones’. This research documentary examines the global issue of offshore tax havens, small jurisdictions which exploit weaknesses in international legal and financial systems to shield the ownership of assets from scrutiny or to reduce tax obligations.

Within his work, Lewis looks for ways to visualise powerful agents, technologies, and practices, and the links that connect them. To do this he employs a range of research strategies, from depth interviewing to open source investigation, and works across media and platforms, using photography, text, video, data visualisation, exhibitions, books, films, and apps.

Previous projects and publications include The Memory of History (2012) for which Lewis travelled through ten European countries documenting the way the past was being politically manipulated in the context of the Euro and sovereign debt crisis that resulted from the 2008 financial crisis. In War Primer 3 (2013), Lewis appropriated a work of photographic art to critique the method of its production and the hypocrisy of an art world which claims to be politically progressive while benefiting from inequalities.

More recently Lewis completed Depravity’s Rainbow (2023) which investigates the connections between early space travel and colonialism and the Holocaust, and the impact of that history on the present.

Lewis has been nominated and shortlisted for prizes including the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2021,  The FOAM Paul Huff award 2021 and 2020, the Kassel book dummy award 2019, Tim Hetherington Visionary Award 2018 and 2017, the Luma Rencontres d’Arles Dummy Book Award 2018, 2016 and 2015, the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award 2017, the Self-Publish Riga Award 2016, the Photo Espana Book Award 2016, and the Bar Tur Photobook Award 2015 and 2014.

For more information about Lewis: http://www.lewisbush.com