As Russian forces maneuver to encircle Ukraine’s capital, Sennik continues posting her ethno-photography for her 43,500 followers but with a new format: a jarring juxtaposition of her pre-war archive alongside the images of war such as bombed out homes and civilian evacuation. “The world I show through my art is being destroyed right now,” Sennik wrote the morning of February 24, the start of the Russian invasion. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Sennik explained what she is trying to convey today with her photography.

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Can you first tell us about the situation where you are now?

In Kyiv, nearly all the roads have been blocked from the west, the south, partially from the north, but as of today, the city is still not fully surrounded by Russian forces. The only way for Russians to get at us is the open sky. The city is getting hit directly by rocket attacks, apartment buildings are being bombed left and right, residential and private buildings, shopping malls, the city center, the outskirts, all over.

I joined the Territorial Defense on the first day. I was at the enlistment office by lunchtime picking out firearms. The Territorial Defense group is all made up of volunteers. There are other women within our battalion, but I’m the only one in our division. For me this was a logical step because it’s my second military experience. The first time, in 2014, I was part of a volunteer battalion. After this I worked in photography and thought that phase of my life was over. But when you’re woken up in the morning from being bombed you’re left with only one choice. And that’s why I’m here again.

How has the war changed your photography?

Originally it was a way to present Ukrainian culture to the world but now my job is to explain what is happening here. I publish my archival images mixed in with photos that I’ve taken now or photos other eyewitnesses sent to me. I really wanted to use this contrast because I can’t shake off the feeling of having my life stolen from me. When I look back, I realize that I had a wonderful life. I had the chance to do my favorite kind of work that was tied to culture and beauty.

And now I’ve lost all of that. Right now someone is trying to physically destroy that life. Even museums are being bombed. Several of my friends have died already. The world where I used to live is being destroyed around me. I wanted to show that contrast. The peace in Ukraine that was in my photos and what is happening to that peace now.

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One of your most popular recent posts was a series of posed WWII-era images you took of couples in 2013 mixed in with photos taken in recent days of real Ukrainian couples being forced to say goodbye to each other. Why did you share this?

These photos were part of a photo shoot from the spring 2013, so even before the revolution. I was later reminded of them almost a year later when the first volunteer battalions were heading to the east of Ukraine. Young women would come to say goodbye to the men in the same way. 

In 2013, these seemed like scenes from the past, from a history that cannot be repeated. How can there be a war again? How can these kinds of farewells be said again?

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So much of Russia’s propaganda and Putin’s remarks have fixated on denying the existence of distinct Ukrainian identity and culture. Do you feel like your work counteracts that false narrative?

I worked for a long time in political communications but my art was never meant for propaganda messaging. I do it just because I love it.

The fact that it can have this effect, that’s not because of me. Beauty is the only language everyone can understand because it can touch all of us. Beauty and this contrast that I’m presenting has allowed me to reach lots of people.

Who are you now trying to reach with your photography?

Ukrainians are already motivated. I don’t think we can possibly get any more motivated than we are today. Ukraine must be the most united country in the world right now. But this war has gone on for three weeks and the world’s attention is already waning. I want to show foreigners what is happening, to show them who we are, what kind of beautiful people we have and how we are saving that. But to also show people what is being done to us: videos of people being killed, of children who have been killed. 

Sometimes people write to me and they say they support me but it’s really difficult to look at the images I am sharing. And I understand them completely. Not a single psychologically normal person should feel ok looking at this. But this is our reality and I’m obliged to share it.

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There is a massive flow of information, videos, and photography from Ukraine. How do you decide what to publish?

What’s the point in publishing photos of dead Russian soldiers when you can instead show the kind of destruction they have caused: ruined homes, civilians evacuating while being shot at, bombings. My role here is to record this and to create an Instagram account of war crimes. 

I don’t try to overstate what I’m doing, I think it is a drop in the ocean, but if it helps tell a few hundred more people about what is happening then that’s great.

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What do people misunderstand about this war?

I think generally people outside Ukraine believe that this war with Russia is a problem just for Ukraine. But that’s not true. Aggressive governments with dysfunctional presidents are problems not just for neighboring countries but for the whole world. 

TV hosts on propaganda channels across Russia are already drawing up maps of what the Baltic states would look like if Russia grabs more territory. We can laugh it off, but half a year ago those maps were of Ukraine and look at what’s happening around us today.

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After the war, how do you think this period in your life will affect your photography?

I don’t think I’ll be photographing war themes in the future. Probably the opposite. I’ve had enough. Instead I’ll focus on things that are absolutely peaceful and beautiful. Because we will all get our fill of war now.

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The post A photographer of Ukrainian beauty turns her lens on war to create heartbreaking juxtaposition appeared first on Coda Story.

As he looked at the sun setting behind the Kremlin walls from a police van, thousands of miles to the west, a prestigious Italian photo exhibition of Gronsky’s work was canceled. “There is a time to firmly affirm the right of peoples to live in peace and a time to open up to dialogue and confrontation, without violence and death being invited to the table,” the exhibition's curators announced.

Like many Russians opposed to the current regime, Gronsky has found himself in an increasingly worrying situation. Outside Russia, businesses and media organizations have stampeded out of the country, halting operations and imports to Russia. The ruble has been crashing. International flights are canceled and visa centers have closed their doors. Inside Russia, the regime has banned words like “war” and “invasion,” censoring the remaining media and intensifying its propaganda campaigns.

Gronsky spoke about art and disinformation in a time of war and the reasons he’s staying put in Russia for now in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

When the exhibit was canceled you said that you were devastated to see art take the blow in this way, but that you understood the motivations behind it. 

As a Russian person I feel powerless, ashamed and furious about everything that's going on. I cannot influence it in any way and I perfectly understand that blame as a result will be put on everything Russian: Russian culture, Russian language and that in the nearest hundred years people will not make films about Nazis, but about awful Russians. Overnight, from being strange, mysterious, aggressive, foolish people we turned into monsters and we will not be able to wash this blame off for a very long time, it's terrible. I am afraid that my son will hide the fact that he is half Russian when he grows up.

How is your work now received abroad?

I have to say I get a huge amount of support from Italy. I get 10 to 15 emails a day with just words of support. I had a group exhibition, a collaboration between the Reggio Emilia region and the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. It was canceled not because I was Russian, but because all collaborations with Russian state institutions were canceled. But I recently got an email from Reggio Emilia inviting me to the festival as a private artist. I don’t think I can go now. It's really important to distinguish between Russian aggression, the Russian state, Russian artists, and Russian culture. 

Meanwhile back at home there is huge pressure, censorship, and mass detentions of protesters — which have included you.

It's not the first time I've been detained at a rally, but it's nasty. When I showed up, I shouted out “No to war!” I was immediately grabbed by my arms and legs, and dragged. I still have this big scratch on my face. I was held for 12 hours at the police station. On March 16 there will be a trial and I will most likely be given a rather large fine.

There’s this feeling of powerlessness. It’s clear that I haven't changed anything [in Russia] but it's impossible not to go out. There are no other options at all. I can't vote, I can't sign a petition. I have to physically present my body as someone who disagrees because all elections and all polls are rigged. And in order to be seen at least in some way, you have to let your body be beaten, which is humiliating, but there is no other option in Russia today.

There is another issue that many Russians opposed to the regime face, which is dealing with their relatives who are pro-Putin and pro-war. This is the case in your own family.

My mom thinks I'm a traitor. It's not a joke. It's not an argument like between someone who likes tea and someone who likes coffee. It's a huge shock to her, despite that for the last 10 years we were more or less aware of the fact that we have different views. I understood that she watches Russian television. She understood that I supported the opposition and we avoided talking about it, but now of course the war has exacerbated it so much that it is a very sharp conflict between us, with tears, with curses. Now everyone understands how serious and catastrophic the situation is. But people who watch Russian TV have this idea that while this is all terrible, we have no other choice. We will fight the whole world, to the last man, but the truth is on our side. The other half of the Russian population have a feeling that we are involved in a heinous crime and will be paying for it all our lives. Our children will be paying the price.

Do you try to make her change her mind? 

It's very difficult, it's such a radical, intransigent position and they have so much rage. The version of events that the state media offers is constructed so that it's not just a version of events, but a complete picture of the world in which everything is explained very clearly. This perfect structure of “the whole world is against us” finds fertile ground in Russia. People believe that we are fighting an evil fascist force, although in fact we are the fascist state that is trying to invade other countries. The amazing thing is that this cheap, talentless construction that's being imposed on everyone — it works, it is amazingly effective. It's a nightmare, how effective this brainwashing is.

Many are urgently leaving Russia. What about you?

I do not plan to flee the country yet. I'm in an advantageous situation, I have little to lose. My parents are in Estonia and they support Putin, but my son is in Latvia. If my child lived in Russia I would have run away a long time ago. I am worried that some of the posts that I wrote on Facebook in support of Ukraine have now become a criminal offense in Russia, but I still decide not to delete them. I don't know, I'm scared but I can't keep quiet either.

It’s scary. When I was a kid we were told a lot about World War II and the Nazi occupation. I often thought about what I would do if I lived at that time and the Nazis invaded and occupied, how I would resist. And now some of those childhood fantasies are coming back again. I just never imagined that I would end up on the fascist side instead of the occupied side. I can't even imagine what's going on and how to put it all together and create a coherent image of the world that I can live in.

No one is bombed in Moscow. Life in general is almost the same as it was a month ago. This is also a shock because I know of the nightmare happening in Ukraine, but my home is fine, the street is fine, the shop offers the same goods, maybe some prices have risen, but there is no sign of a nightmare.

And I see that most people live with the version that this war is some foreign policy nonsense somewhere far away. People honestly believe that after a couple of days everything will go back to normal; it's just some political games. And at the same time there is a feeling that I am inside a cartoon because I've never seen such grotesque evil, such obvious grotesque evil. There’s always been shades of gray everywhere, everything was so complicated and suddenly, for the first time in my life, everything is simple. There is absolute evil that cannot be justified in any way. But I don't know how much strength I have in me, how far I am willing to go in resisting it. I am human after all.

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The post Canceled exhibitions of Russian artists trigger self-loathing, anxiety appeared first on Coda Story.

The eight-year conflict in eastern Ukraine has often been drowned in disinformation and tainted political narratives. Belorusets set out to correct this. I spoke with her about the importance of telling unheard stories, in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book shows what everyday life has been like for eastern Ukrainian factory workers, florists, manicurists, cosmetologists since 2014. Why did you decide that these fragmentary stories had to be told?

In this tragic situation in eastern Ukraine, violence emerges as an unnatural reality imposed from outside. Discussions usually center around big politics and trying to stop the aggressor. And that's normal. But my work allows me to look at the situation in more detail, to go deeper to the level where the interpersonal is more important than big politics.

I wanted to make this part of reality more visible and reaffirm its right to exist. A right that is very easily overlooked during radical military violence and in international discourse that acts not on behalf of a person, but a continent, country or region.

In one of the stories, “The Stars,” women sheltering in basements decide when it’s safe to go outside based on horoscopes. They don’t know if they are being shelled by Russian-backed militants or the Ukrainian troops and some of them even believe it’s Canada bombing to get the town’s coal. Was the story meant to illustrate the dizzying effect of a constant information war?

In 2014/2015 the Ukrainian media did not know what to do with this catastrophe. The inhabitants of these towns found themselves under attack. And, if before, every single killing of this kind without a trial would have been a crime requiring press and investigation, the new situation was different. People were dying in the streets from shelling, and the media said nothing about these victims, neither Ukrainian nor Russian. Moreover, Russian media began their toxic work of completely distorting the reality, creating numerous contradictory, inconsistent interpretations of events. 

The sharp devaluation of one's own life and these media mirages, media hallucinations, led to all kinds of rumors being spread among the residents of many small towns in Donbas. But most fundamentally, you wished to trust yourself more than any external sources of information. But how do you find your own credibility when there's fire under your feet? This is what my story is about.

Why are most of the protagonists in stories women? 

I didn’t want to bring everything to women’s bodies or women’s voices. But it turned out that the majority of people, whose experience stuck with me or seemed to me important, were women.

Many women were very honest with me exactly because they thought their experience wasn’t as important as that of men and hence so insignificant that talking about it wasn’t even dangerous. The conflict between self-negation and self-expression of those women — these elements seemed very valuable to me while writing.

Yet for me it’s very important to bring this not exclusively to women’s experiences but rather to the experiences that are most often seen among women, the experiences of living through those events as if from the second row of history.

What do people get wrong about how war affects people?

Sometimes, especially in the cities on the frontline, the collateral damage is coming from the Ukrainian side, not only from the Russian side. People live with the constant feeling of danger and incredible unfairness. 

Often people from Kyiv go to these places, like international journalists or people trying to help, and they ask these people what they think about politics. Sometimes they say, "We hate the Russians and the Ukrainians, leave us alone." And these very honest words are often used against them, that they are not patriotic enough, or they're not pro-Ukrainian enough. Maybe they don't understand what the political stakes are, but in my view, it's a very Soviet attitude towards people whose situation is so far from any kind of normalcy that you cannot force them to have some kind of “right” view. 

I think these people are heroes because they are trying to go on with their everyday peaceful life in a war zone. And maybe they can show us all how you can remain a person in a conflict, in the situation telling you, "You are not a human now, you can die every day just because you are crossing the street."

There’s a recurring character in your stories — Andrea. At times she gets very excited about the future but at other times she is very pessimistic about her own life as well as Ukraine’s future, and her presence is always fleeting. What is her role in your book?

The character of Andrea is all about love, about infatuation and connection between two women. She sounds negative and is complaining but complaining is the start of becoming a revolutionary. She is about the relations among different realities in Ukraine, about their capacity to simultaneously hate and love one another. Because in the contexts of such diversity, even mutual dislike can be productive, becoming the part of the exchange, which can be a stage to growth and development.

The post Exploring the everyday lives of the people in eastern Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

“For the simulation part, we want visitors to actually feel the experience,” said Idris Ayas, 29, who came to Istanbul to study law 10 years ago. “By touching the Tiger Chair, by visiting the forced cotton-picking farm, the forced abortion room and the concentration camp cells, visitors actually feel that these things are really happening in 2022.”

Steps away from Istanbul University, the Uyghur Genocide Museum is a student-led exhibition organized in the quiet courtyard of the East Turkistan Foundation. The Uyghur student group created the series of “simulation” rooms according to testimony from last summer’s Uyghur Tribunal in London and other first-hand accounts gathered by the group.

The students behind the Genocide Museum, nearly all of whom have relatives or parents detained in Xinjiang camps, are well aware of the challenges of creating such a space.

An exhibition is visual by nature, yet since 2017 Xinjiang is effectively a black box to the outside world with Uyghurs living abroad losing contact with family members and foreigners or journalists largely barred from traveling to the region. Today images from Xinjiang, and its network of re-education camps, are largely gathered from space via satellites.

“My father and mother tried to come to my graduation ceremony in 2017,” said Ayas. “But at the beginning of 2017, all the borders were closed. Their passports were confiscated. After September 2017, I lost contact with my family members.”

On several occasions, Omar said the group gave visitors checklists from “48 Ways to Get Sent to a Chinese Concentration Camp.”

“They would check off if they prayed, or grew a beard, if they’ve been out of the country, if they use WhatsApp. 99% of the people found that they have all the criteria that qualifies them to get into one of these concentration camps.”

The student group spent their summer vacation planning the project, opening the space last fall. So far they say feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of visitors made up of Turkish students and international tourists.

“We knew the Olympics were coming and we thought it was a good opportunity to educate people about our cause so they can start acting while the world is directing their attention to China,” Omar said.

“There is a lot of disinformation about Uyghurs, especially in Turkey,” said Ayas. “Others said, I know there is a genocide happening there, but after I touched the Tiger Chair, I felt how horrible this is.

“It’s a shocking truth for visitors to actually accept it.”

The exhibition is ongoing, open every day (call ahead for the simulation rooms to be opened) and has no end date. Starting in March, the students plan to update the exhibition and add new items to the museum.

“We named it the Uyghur Genocide Museum, but it’s not a museum,” Ayas said. “It’s not a history, it’s an ongoing genocide happening in our hometown.”

China's repression of journalists

China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it

Katia Patin

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

Frankie Vetch

Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press

Erica Hellerstein

The post Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide 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.  

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