In a dark echo of her work, Djabbarova was now under online surveillance herself. “I was just the perfect enemy,” she tells me, “because I’m queer, I’m not Slavic, I worked on decolonial and feminist projects… So boom, it happened.”

She is speaking to me from Hamburg, where she now lives. Djabbarova is part of the so-called fifth wave of writers exiled from Russia, alongside Maria Stepanova, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Maxim Osipov to name a few. Her upbeat tone during our call gives little indication of the arduous journey she has endured since fleeing Russia. Upon receiving a humanitarian visa from Germany, she spent months in a refugee camp. She lived, she says, “in a container house, literally a shipping container. You feel like you're not a subject, not a human being.” 

More permanent accommodation has provided a degree of safety and stability, but a sense of precariousness lingers. She describes her position as an exile as “strange” — on the one hand she has been welcomed into Germany’s cultural elite in winning the Hamburger Literaturpreis; on the other, she feels like a “ghost,” unable to express herself in German and often bewildered by the unfamiliarity of everyday tasks in a new country, and in a new city which, she tells me jokingly, is quaint and polite like the well-behaved boy next door. 

But there’s a deeper, historical layer to Djabbarova’s story of exile. Her father was a refugee from the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, while her mother was forced out of her family home. “Homelessness and exile — this is my heritage,” she says. Being othered became a common theme of Djabbarova’s childhood, as a child of Azeri parents living in Yekaterinburg. “In Russia you are constantly reminded that you're not Russian,” she says. “Then during the summer you visit your relatives in Azerbaijan and they laugh because you cannot speak Azerbaijani properly.”

This sense of double estrangement is mirrored in “My Dreadful Body” (published in Russian in 2023 and recently translated into English by Lisa Hayden). At only a touch over 100 pages, it is a slim but powerful account of the pressures on one woman growing up among the strict codes of an Azerbaijani family living in Russia. A sense of surveillance and conditional belonging defines the narrator’s upbringing: “In the world where I grew up,” she writes, “gazes penetrated every little corner. The evil eye, the neighbors’ eyes, the relatives’ eyes, the random pedestrian’s eyes, the unscrupulous men’s eyes, the women’s unhappy eyes. Life in the community was reminiscent of a reality show with constant video surveillance: no action, word, or undertaking went unnoticed.”

The story is based on Djabbarova’s own life. “Maybe 70-80% of this story is absolutely true”, she confirms. The narrator is named Egana, she grows up in an Azerbaijani family in Russia, too Russian for the family, not Russian enough for her friends at school. She also, like Djabbarova, suffers from a debilitating autoimmune disorder that is eventually diagnosed as dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions. During one episode, she describes her body as resembling “willow branches gone mad from a strong wind” — a potent image of struggle against external forces. Djabbarova describes the book as a way to reclaim her body through language. “I was trying to tell this story in a poetic way. I wanted to change my body into poetry.” 

Each chapter of “My Dreadful Body” begins with a different body part (“Eyebrows,” “Eyes,” “Hair” and so on), like the poetic blazons spun by Renaissance poets. Where those poems encouraged an idealized, sensationalized reading of each body part, Djabbarova’s chapters are more sober explorations of the physical limits — and personal and cultural stories — these body parts contain. 

In one of many poignant scenes, the narrator’s head is shaved in preparation for a procedure. She cries on seeing her “shorn scalp,” but the sadness is not aesthetic, it’s ancestral; the act marks a symbolic rupture with her lineage. “My past,” she writes, “the past of all the women in my family, the memory of my ancestors, the history of a single body — all that now lay on the cold floor.” After this scene, her grandmother’s dictum that only long hair was considered beautiful, rings even more sharply. 

Illness then emerges as another form of exile, from one’s sense of self, from what’s perceived as “normal” in society, from the culture and community one belongs to. “They do not see you as a subject, as a human being, and they do not recognize your existence… I realized if I wanted to be seen as a subject, I needed to do it myself.” Djabbarova is talking about the plight to be believed about her symptoms here, but she could easily be talking about the often dehumanizing experience of exile. In both instances there is something fundamental under question, or as Djabbarova puts it, “You’re trying to prove that you have the right of being. You’re trying not to be erased.” 

We often talk about exile in the context of loss, but how might exile liberate? Paradoxically, Djabbarova tells me, her diagnosis became a form of liberation. “I always felt I had so many expectations on me as a girl, as a woman, so when I was finally diagnosed it was a liberation because my parents realized I would never be this type of girl.” Exile breeds a particular creative liberation, too, evidenced by the fact Djabbrova wrote the novel from Taiwan where she was briefly teaching Russian. “Here I had enough distance from my own life and my own experience,” she says. “Maybe it’s easier to write about your story being on an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

Writing is arguably the real heroine of Djabbarova's novel. For the narrator Egana, it is a place free from surveillance and a source of protection, “like an invisible amulet.” Poetry, she told me “was the only safe space for me because nobody was asking anything of me. It's the only place where I don't feel judged. I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel questioned.”

The chapter “Hands” opens: “The most important parts of a woman’s body were her hands: they prepared food, rocked children, did laundry, ironed men’s shirts, sewed clothes, swept, washed the floor, and dusted.… Any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing.” To use her hands, then, to write becomes both a symbolic and quite literal form of resistance against such gendered codes.

Notably, Djabbarova is not alone in invoking the body as a space to explore the upheavals of exile. In Maria Stepanova’s autofictional work “The Disappearing Act” — recently translated into English by Sasha Dugdale — the narrator attempts to purge herself by volunteering to be cut in half as part of a circus trick. Djabbarova’s approach to reclaim identity and agency through the body is less literal, and more personal, but through this specificity she has landed somewhere indisputably universal. 

“I realized the only way I can write this novel is through my body,” she says. “Because the only way I can rehabilitate my being, my agency, my subjectivity is through my body. And that's why I wanted every reader to feel my body… It's really important for all of us not to forget that this right of being is basic. It's not given. It's something you have from birth." 

At the end of our conversation, Djabbarova (who has been speaking in English) struggles to recall a word and jokes that learning German is slowly pushing her English out. “Certain words I only remember in German!” she laughs. Is this the beginnings of a kind of homemaking for Djabbarova, a sign that the seeds she has scattered in her new country are taking root? Like her protagonist, who finds solace and safety in words, it seems that Djabbarova’s most trusted tool for survival, for managing the condition of exile, is language. 

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The post Exiled at Midnight appeared first on Coda Story.

Over the holidays I put together a playlist of my favorite anti-surveillance songs. Here are the top six.

1. German band Kraftwerk predicted ubiquitous surveillance before face recognition, social media or the Internet of Things. Kraftwerk's "Computerwelt" raised an alarm about data collection in 1981. The lyrics are straightforward:

“Interpol and Deutsche Bank
FBI and Scotland Yard
Flensburg and the BKA
they all have our data” 

2. In 1985, Glen Chomik and Mark Woodlake released a single called "Don’t let computers grow." The lyrics are prophetic: "We go from Silicon Valley to the Valley of Death." Thirty-seven years later, Silicon Valley monetizes billions from violent content and misinformation. 

Computers controlling the state, stop the machines, before it’s too late.
Standard protection will never do, your PC is watching you.
I know, I know, don’t let computers grow.

3. American hip hop duo Dead Prez in the '90’s — never reticent about tackling social issues — tried to shed light on police violence, militarization, and state surveillance through a track called "Police State". 

“Red, Black and Green instead of gang bandanas
F.b.i. Spyin' on us through the radio antennas
And them hidden cameras in the streetlight watchin' society
With no respect for the people's right to privacy”

4. “Mac 10 Handle" from Prodigy's 2007 album Return of the Mac is another song on the surveillance beat. The “On Star” mentioned in the lyrics is a driver assistance tool developed by General Motors that enabled police to access cars. 

“Be careful where you pull that trigger they got you on film
They got eyes in the sky, we under surveillance
That On Star on your car track everywhere you've been
Gotta watch what I say, they tappin' my cell phone
They wanna sneak and peak inside my home
I'm paranoid and it's not the weed”

5. In 2013, electropop music group Yacht and the stand-up comedian Marc Maron were so concerned about the National Security Agency spying on Americans, they donated 100% of their earnings from "Party at the NSA” downloads to the Internet Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.  

We don’t need no privacy.
What do you want that for?
Don’t you think it’ll spoil our fun
If you let that whistle blow?
P-P-P-Party at the NSA,
Twenty, twenty, twenty-four hours a day!

6. Numerous rappers including 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G have dedicated bars to phone tapping. Rick Ross, one of my favorite rappers, went off in it in "Holy Ghost.” I am looking forward to future hip-hop tracks about current phone tapping superstar, Pegasus spyware. 

They wanna do it big? Pick a time tonight
Back to these bitches following my timeline
Back to these crackers following my timeline
Got the phone tapped, I think I'm being followed
Touch him with the Holy Ghost, can you hear me Father?

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The post Can’t take my eyes off you appeared first on Coda Story.

Ostensibly a photobook on the small Macedonian town of Veles, which made international headlines in 2016 as the unlikely factory of pro-Trump fake news, The Book of Veles created a furore after Bendiksen revealed that the project’s images were synthetically generated using 3D software and the book’s text was written entirely by artificial intelligence. 

Fascinated with the story of Veles as well as with developments in synthetic imagery, Bendiksen set out to see just how “real” he could make his images. Although he left breadcrumbs throughout the text, to his surprise the book was published in April 2021 to “nice, positive echo-chamber feedback,” said Bendiksen. No one questioned the authenticity of the images or text. He stepped up the game by then submitting his manipulated photographs to the world’s most prestigious photojournalism festival Visa pour l'image which screened his images in September.

“I thought, what could be a higher threshold for fooling someone with junk, synthetic images than this crowd?,” said Bendiksen. “I gave it 24 hours for someone to come with some questions about the work. It didn’t happen.” The photographer’s final attempt to out himself involved buying a squadron of Facebook and Twitter bots to attack him online. The bots posted dozens of messages claiming that his work was fraudulent, only to have Bendiksen’s colleagues and supporters rush to his defense.

Bendiksen finally came clean in an interview on September 17 with Magnum Photos. We spoke with Bendiksen about what he’s come away with from the experience and how the project has continued to take unexpected turns even after his revelation last month.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What were the main goals that you set out with?

I wanted to create some discussion and awareness around this technology but I didn’t go into this project wanting it to be just a technical demonstration of something. I get into my projects because it’s a good story to tell. If it hadn’t been for all these exciting layers of Veles and mythology I wouldn’t have done this. All of these parts of the puzzle fell miraculously into place.

Yes, tell us more about how the puzzle fell into place, there are so many bizarre layers to this project.

One was the discovery of the historical layers to the story. The town Veles is named after this pre-Christian Slavic god who was a kind of sneaky guy, a shapeshifter who turns into a bear, a god of chaos and deception and magic. I thought he would probably be super happy about all this deception going on in Veles.

The introduction written by AI is still a bit clumsy. Some of your images, especially the one of a bear stomping through town, feel like they should have set off some alarm bells. Yet it was all “real” enough that no one questioned it.

That was also something that frightened me. The technology in the field has developed a lot even from when I started using it to when the project was done. It’s clear to me that within a few years 95% or more of people will have a hard time decoding whether an article was written by a New York Times journalist or a bot. I wanted this to be a look into what I think is the near future of our information landscape.

How are our current concerns about automation or AI different from all the previous technology scares?

In photography at every step when there is a new technology people say it’s the collapse of truth. Whether that was when digital cameras came or when Photoshop showed up. People always cried wolf like that. Maybe I’m the same and this is a bunch of wolf crying and this will sort itself out nicely.

But I think the difference is: automation and synthetics. We will always have good journalism but I think it will be mixed in with so much synthetic junk or half synthetic junk that it will just be very, very chaotic and difficult to navigate. The difference is that the automation of it gives it such a bigger potential for spread and makes it so difficult to contain.

You’ve repeatedly compared your work to a penetration test that hackers run searching for vulnerabilities in their code. These tests then allow companies to better fortify their software and find solutions for loopholes in the code. What did your stress test reveal and what solutions did it reveal to you?

I’m not trying to pretend I have all the answers but I think there are many levels to it. I think the content verification business will be an industry unto itself. This is also a call out to social media platforms who I believe have failed us in many ways on this front thus far to step up the game. This is a call out to our education system. As a father of four, I’m wondering how my children are going to handle this. To be a functional citizen in the next 50 years, navigating the information space should be at least as important a subject as mathematics in schools.

This story continues to go in unexpected directions. Tell us about the latest.

A junk information site pretending to be a newspaper in Texas called Texas News Today came out from a very similar story that was stolen from Wired about my project. I think it’s automated: they suck stuff into their system, rewrite it and then it gets blasted out again on all these websites which look very similar to what the fake news websites out of Veles were doing. It’s the same business model. I looked into it and it turns out these people at Texas News Today are a junk news site based in Pune, India running a bunch of sites from this location in different languages.

Now, these fake news sites are stealing stories about my fake news project. And there are people quoting the fake writer who supposedly wrote the piece as some credible source. It’s full circle. There you can see the whole mechanism of the chaos.

The post A photographer and artist walk into a fake news factory appeared first on Coda Story.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start off by talking about my favorite project of yours: “Shadows of the State.” It concentrates on quite an odd subject that I just happen to have a mild obsession with. However, for the uninitiated, what’s it all about?

The short version is that it’s about these weird radio broadcasts from what people refer to as “numbers stations.” I discovered them when I was supposed to be doing something else, procrastinating, and fell down a Wikipedia hole. The term covers dozens of different stations and the main thing they have in common is that they consist of someone reading out lots of random numbers on air. It's quite difficult to answer what they actually are, because no one has ever really confessed to operating them. 

I think the most convincing answer, based on what we know about them, is that they're used by intelligence agencies to send coded messages to undercover agents in enemy countries. I could go into why I think that, but it’s probably far too much information. There’s just a lot of circumstantial evidence that supports this explanation.

The book doesn’t conform to the classic definition of photojournalism. How do you go about presenting something so opaque — and non-visual — as a photographic work?

The idea was to try and accumulate any information I could about these stations, some of which was current, and some of which was historic. So, I started reading around. Some people listen to numbers stations as a hobby and have pieced a lot together and made some informed guesses as to where they come from and who operates them, which was also useful. One or two stations had already been pretty decisively located. I’d try and build up a kind of dossier of information about each one.

I was looking at lots of different sources: enthusiast websites, books, a lot of declassified documents, memoirs by former intelligence agents, anything that might touch on the subject. Once I felt I had as much as I was going to get for an individual station, I’d go to Google Maps and look at the area where the evidence pointed to a site being. Then, I’d think, “Does this match the description I’ve read?” Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t, and there was very, very rarely a smoking gun. 

So, there are three kinds of imagery in the book. First, there are satellite images, extracted using a rather tedious and laborious process, from Google Maps. Second, there are Google Street View images of some sites. I included these because people kept asking me, “Why don't you go visit these sites and take pictures of them?” I didn’t exactly want to show up and get arrested in North Korea for doing that, but there was another point to using satellite imagery. A lot of these sites were created at a time when they only had to be secret from ground view, so seeing them at that level would actually be very unrevealing. Now that ordinary people have access to satellite technology, you can see a lot more, if you look for it. Lastly, there are these rather weird images called spectrographs, which are visualizations of the broadcasts, representations of the radio signals themselves.

Yes, and you even included barcodes that link to some of the stations, which I thought was a really nice touch. Now, all this talk of espionage, militarism and satellites brings us nicely onto your forthcoming book “Wv.B,” which examines the life of a fascinating historical character. Wernher von Braun was a former SS officer and rocket engineer in Nazi Germany, who went on to work for NASA, developing the rockets that launched Explorer I, the United States' first satellite. Can you tell us a little bit about this?

It actually grew out of “Shadows of the State.” During that project, I was reading quite a lot about satellite imagery, because I think it's quite rash to use a photographic method or any kind of technology without really understanding a bit about where it comes from. As I was researching this, I came across this really weird image: the first photograph taken of the Earth from space. It was taken in 1947, which was kind of remarkable because that was 10 years before the launch of Sputnik, and 12 or 13 years before the launch of the first spy satellite. So, my immediate thought was, “Where did this come from?”

It turned out that it was taken by a V2 rocket, launched from Mexico by the U.S. military. That opened up this whole story of how Von Braun and other Nazi-era rocket specialists were recruited at the end of the Second World War, given, essentially, an exemption from post-war justice and brought to the United States to develop ballistic missiles for the U.S. Army and, later, to work for NASA. 

It chimed with something that I was thinking about already: the militarization of space and the way that the aspiration of space being this kind of neutral domain hasn't really been borne out. Von Braun was interesting to me because his life was so divided between these very military, violent uses of rocketry, and then these kind of — at least superficially — very civil and peaceful ones. As the project developed, it basically became clear that, despite things like the Apollo project being presented as peaceful and not overtly military, they were definitely geopolitical and all about a jockeying for position between states, much more than being about scientific discovery. So, yeah, that was the starting point for another four years down another rabbit hole.

So, what was your process for this project?

The bulk of it is composed of archival imagery from lots of different sources. There's some from NASA, inevitably, some from the space agencies of other countries, some from various militaries. A lot of these images are held in the archives of various national museums. That was one half of the story. The other half were mostly pre-war and Second World War images, which again came from a variety of sources, including museum archives, but also a lot of personal, intimate photographs from people like Von Braun and people close to him, which had found their way onto the internet. Then, alongside that, I was also going to go to some of the key sites in the history of rocketry and photograph them. Initially, the plan was to go to the U.S., but the pandemic got in the way of that.

Before that kicked off, though, I was able to go to Germany, travel around and go to these places that are basically the cradle of space exploration, but are virtually forgotten today. I went to the place where the first manmade object in space was launched from. It’s this weird peninsula on the Baltic coast, called Peenemünde. I stood on the site where this huge event took place, and there’s nothing there. It's just a forest full of bits of concrete, deer and unexploded bombs, and you just think, “Wow, this is the place where that happened, and it's off people's radar already.” I also had a plan to visit sites in the United States, but the pandemic made that very challenging, and I started to think the project didn’t need them — we already know that side of the story so well.

You’ve also looked into the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, particularly computer vision. You’ve done that by referencing a pretty seminal work in photographic circles: John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing.” Again, this isn’t a traditional documentary photographic project. It actually takes the form of an app. Can you tell me a bit about it and what the ideas behind it are?

I should say that, at this stage, it’s kind of a work in progress. But, yes, “Ways of Seeing” is this book and BBC TV series from 1972, about art and a lot more. It's about the idea that seeing is very political, that the way we're taught to look and the way we look at things is very culturally constructed. 

At the time, it was very influential. It took quite difficult ideas, for example from Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, and ideas that were also then quite new and radical, like feminist theory. It packaged all of that stuff in a way that actually made it really accessible. The TV series was seen by millions of people and the book has sold millions of copies, too. There are, obviously, a lot of great things about it, but there was one area in which it seemed quite dated to me, in that it couldn't have anticipated that we now live in a world where we're not the only ones who see in that way. That’s not to say that machines see like us, but they do see in a way which is politically charged.

What interested me was to try and take some of Berger’s ideas, in terms of unpacking the politics of sight, but to apply them to computer vision systems. I wanted to use the same technology I was making a critique of, so I opted for augmented reality, which relies on a quite basic form of computer vision to work. The idea was that you would run the app and point your device at a copy of the original book. The app would then recognize the pages and, depending on which ones it was looking at, overlay different things on top of them, to create this kind of new book that only exists virtually. 

I've been working on it for a few years, but I realized, as I was building the app, that the current technology is really at the limits of what I needed it to be able to do. In a couple of years, when augmented reality and smartphone technology have moved on, I think it will be more feasible to fully do what I want to do with it.

That’s interesting. Apps are constantly being updated and changed, so that means that this project could never be finished, in the way that it is when, say, you publish in book form. 

The idea of an app is attractive in that sense, in that it could be quite organic and persistently evolving. But, in some ways, the nice thing about a book is you hit print and that's it. It's done. A line has been drawn.

It’s good that we’re talking about books now. With the Ways of Seeing Algorithmically app and, to a lesser degree, with “Shadows of the State,” you’ve integrated your work pretty seamlessly with contemporary technology.  However, I always associate your practice with print. You’re a big advocate of the zine and books and have published quite a number of them. What draws you to print and what makes it so central to your work?

That’s an interesting question. I mean, I think it's probably the kind of stuff I produce. I work with text a lot, as well as images. Of course, you can read text online, but reading a book is quite a different experience: there aren't any distractions around you in the same way they are when you're reading online. Partly, it’s the material and the relationship I want people to have with the work. Then there’s this romantic idea I have: that the book is something that you put out into the world and, after that, you have no idea of the kind of encounters it has. There are no analytics for a book. I also like the idea that, you know, my books could physically outlast me and still be out there when I'm in the ground.

So, there are two more projects that I want to talk about. “Metropole,” a book that deals with the machinations of the London property boom and the ways overseas wealth has altered the geography and the character of the city, and the ongoing Trading Zones which interrogates the murky world of offshore finance. There’s a clear thematic link between them and in terms of your approach, because they both involve a lot of photographs that you made yourself.

This is another good example of useless information that you build up going on to have a future life. I worked on “Metropole” between about 2014 and 2015. I'd kind of finished it and then I began Trading Zones — another of the numerous unresolved projects I've got on the go at any given time — but it wasn’t the plan for them to flow from one to the other. Basically, I applied for this residency in the Channel Islands in Jersey, which is an offshore financial center or tax haven. I didn't expect to get it, because my proposal was for a project about finance on the island, which is a somewhat controversial topic.

It was an accident, but a happy one, in the sense that a lot of the knowledge that I’d accumulated about these complex financial products and instruments and dealings went hand-in-hand with it. It was interesting to go to the source, too. Some of the buildings I'd been looking at in “Metropole” were owned by shell companies registered in Jersey. So, it was weird to then go to the place where these assets were nominally held and to see that it was a complete fiction. Of course, there was no real person “owning” them in Jersey. They were controlled by someone probably thousands of miles away, or by another company in another jurisdiction.

As far as the images are concerned, I’m a photographer, by training and by profession. Its what I made my living from for years, but I don’t really feel that I have anything to prove as a photographer. I look at a lot of photography and often end up thinking that the person who has made it has put a lot of energy into trying to show how technically good they are, whereas, for me, I’m more interested in the idea of telling a compelling story in the best way I can than showing what I can do.

Aesthetically, Metropole was quite inspired by Japanese photography from the 60s and 70s, people like Daido Moriyama, who kind of rejected conventions and took pictures that were very grainy, blurry and went against what a lot of people consider good photographs. I was using double exposures, shooting at night and pushing the ISO as high as possible, with the aim of creating something quite unsettling and to emulate the sense of disorientation that you get walking around London. I don't feel like I recognize my own city now, because of the changes that have swept through it.

Talking about aesthetics and techniques makes me want to ask a very quick question that you might hate me for. Do you see yourself as a documentarian or an artist and, actually, do those terms even have to be mutually exclusive? 

They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but I don't consider myself to be an artist. I also have mixed feelings about the words “documentarian” and “documentary,” but they're probably slightly better and more useful to me. It's interesting that even John Grierson — the film-maker who kind of coined the term “documentary,” at least in English — was also very ambivalent about the word, but just felt that it was the best thing he had to describe what was then quite a new field. He also defined the documentary process as the “creative treatment of reality,” which I think is a great description of what I’m often doing. However, if I’m going to say what I am, I generally just say that I’m a photographer. Everyone has a relationship with photography and to say that you’re a photographer means something to them, whereas, if you say you’re an artist or a documentarian, that can be either meaningless or even quite threatening to some people.

Your work addresses a number of complex contemporary themes that affect all of our lives, from covert intelligence and global finance to technology and information flows — things that are all very familiar to Coda readers. We spend a lot of time trying to tease out these ideas in the form of written journalism. What role do you feel that photography has in illuminating them and cutting through the bewildering mess of information and disinformation surrounding them.

Well, I tend to use a lot of text in my projects, too. Obviously, text and photographs speak to people in very different ways. I like the fact that with text, you can really be very precise and pull apart ideas, but I also like the fact that images offer space for people to think about what they mean and pull them apart themselves, without me telling them what I think they mean. 

One of the things I'm keen to do with my projects, even in a very modest way, is talk to people who wouldn’t necessarily think about these things. I like the fact that people like offshore finance workers or intelligence agencies, they're interested in what people are saying about them. I think that natural curiosity is an opportunity to engage those people.

Obviously, most people buying my books probably feel quite similarly to me already and it's very much a case of preaching to the converted. So, I think the real thrill or victory is when someone who doesn't feel the same as me engages with the work — even if they still come away disagreeing with me. I like the idea of complicating these conversations and getting away from the binaries that dominate so much of today’s discourse. Yeah, I think for me, that's what documentary photography can do.

To round up, I’ve got one final question: anyone who spends a bit of time with your work will definitely be able to see that there’s something that binds all of it together. They might have a hard time articulating exactly what it is, though. Do you want to have a go at doing that in a few words?

Oh, that's easy. It's all about power: what it is, who has it, how it works, how it circulates and how it affects all of our lives. That's the thread, for me, at least, that runs through pretty much every project I've ever done.

Follow Lewis Bush on Twitter and Instagram. His work is available for purchase from his website.  

The post Secret radio stations, V2 rockets, offshore tax havens: the photographic explorations of Lewis Bush appeared first on Coda Story.