Lewis Bush is a London-based photographer whose work covers themes ranging from espionage and oligarchy to artificial intelligence and the manipulation of history by national governments. He has published a range of books, including “Metropole” (2015), which examines the murky world of offshore finance and property development in London, and “Shadows of the State” (2018), which looks into the possibility that foreign intelligence services are broadcasting seemingly random strings of numbers on radio stations across the globe. His widely exhibited images are held in a number of institutional and private collections. He is also a course leader of the MA in documentary photography at London College of Communications. We caught up with him to chat about the role photography can play in untangling the web of conflicting information that surrounds us all today. 

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.