The word in Lewis Bush’s title once named London itself: the mother city at the centre of an empire that, at its height, covered a quarter of the world’s land. Metropole, published by Overlapse in 2018, keeps that older name in view while photographing the arrangement that replaced it — a city rebranded as an investment opportunity, and rebuilt accordingly.
Bush made these pictures over dozens of winter nights, walking a London that appeared to be demolishing and reconstructing itself at once. His subject is the machinery of high-end development: the skeletal frames of luxury residential towers caught mid-construction, cranes, hoardings, the glossy buildings that follow. The photographs are not straightforward records. Bush layers one exposure over another until towers accumulate in the frame the way they accumulate on the skyline. Perspective slips, orientation fails, and the image starts to behave like the thing it describes — a city that no longer resolves into a legible whole.
That formal decision carries the book’s argument. The publisher’s own framing is explicit about the consequences of this influx of capital: genuinely affordable housing diminished, long-standing residents pushed further from the centre, absentee owners and speculators taking their place. The double exposure is not ornament. It is a way of registering scale, repetition, and the vertigo of watching a familiar place become unfamiliar — a loss many Londoners would recognise.
For a collector working across contemporary documentary and the photobook as a form of urban criticism, Metropole is worth attention for how tightly its method and its subject are bound together: a book about layering that is itself built out of layers. Bush is also a lecturer in photojournalism and documentary photography in London, which situates the work within current arguments about how cities are photographed and who they are photographed for. The 2018 Overlapse paperback, in English and roughly 20 by 28 centimetres, is a compact, deliberate object rather than a survey — closer to a sustained essay than a portfolio, and best read as one.
