BUSH, Lewis (Londra, 1988)Metropole

Design di Tom Mrazauskas

Firma autografa dell'Artista in argento (Signed by the Artist)

Once the Metropole or mother city at the heart of a vast global empire, London is now the dominion to a new world power. Subject to the flows of global finance and whims of markets, the city has become little more than an investment opportunity for multinational developers and overseas investors. Metropole records the brutally disorientating effects of this by documenting these legions of new corporate and residential blocks as they are constructed and occupied. Multiple exposure photographs are combined with appropriated, repurposed photographs taken from the billboards of the developments, alongside extensive research into the property developers behind these schemes, including their extensive use of opaque offshore financial structures and unaccountable political lobbying.

British photographer Lewis Bush (1988) looks in his ninth monograph Metropole at an imagined future of London. Captured during walks through his city of birth, the book's images depict London as an increasingly unaffordable and unfamiliar city. As Bush's introduction to the book explains, he thinks that London's commercial drive and city transformation is turning London into a city that is “devoid of a future, bereft of the past.” He captured this view in high contrast black and white photos of high flat buildings, photographed mostly in the dark, with the light that shines through countless windows creating abstract patterns. Towards the end of the book, the patterns become more and more dizzying, leaving no benchmark for the viewer, suggesting a time travel, arriving in the last photo, a majestic bird's eye view of London's financial centre. 

Una volta metropoli al centro di un vasto impero globale, Londra è ora il dominio di una nuova potenza mondiale. Soggetta ai flussi della finanza globale e ai capricci dei mercati, la città è diventata poco più di un'opportunità di investimento per gli sviluppatori multinazionali e gli investitori d'oltremare. Metropole registra gli effetti brutalmente disorientanti di ciò, documentando legioni di nuovi quartieri aziendali e residenziali mentre vengono costruiti e occupati. Le fotografie a esposizione multipla sono combinate con fotografie riproposte prese dai cartelloni pubblicitari insieme a un'ampia ricerca sugli sviluppatori immobiliari dietro questi schemi, compreso il loro ampio uso di strutture finanziarie offshore opache e lobbismo politico incontrollabile.