Richard Ansett

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published. 

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged. 

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London

 

© Lewis Fisher 2020

In 2015 I was commissioned to photograph the students of an independent specialist further education college for young people with physical disabilities, acquired brain injuries and associated learning difficulties. During this commission to positively represent the work of the college and its students I met and photographed Lewis for the first time and was struck, as any one who meets him are, by his beauty, energy and charisma.

During this first meeting I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that, in my mind, conflicted with the reality of Lewis’s Cerebral Palsy. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image by sheer accident that represented him in an ‘acceptable aesthetic’ way. I was uncomfortable with this expectation, that in the capture of what we have come to understand as a ‘good photograph’ I was required to filter out the majority of Lewis’s reality as a disabled person and that in denying this I was complicit in a form of gaslighting that contributes a potential harming relationship to his own self-image. This filtering or editing out of Lewis’s complex reality continued into the post-production and final choices of the images that published.

In the moment of this first session I explored these ideas, capturing all aspects of Lewis’s movement.

My practice has always explored the margins of normative reality led by my own journey to self-understanding and self-love. This first experience of working with Lewis challenged my relationship to his condition as a mask to his unique humanity rather than a celebration of all aspects of it. It is an accident of sympathy that we may neglect to recognise and celebrate a subject’s reality that might not be in tune to our own. This first brief photographic session inspired and reinforced the idea already forming in my mind that the aesthetic rules and criteria of the normative world were in themselves oppressive and micro-aggressive to those who exist on the margins or those outside of this imposed reality. Further, that these same rules are oppressive to all of us in the expectation we have increasingly to compete with absurd, idealised notions of beauty. These rules are not natural, they are cultural behavioural norms, barely evolved memes passed down from art history that have the potential to oppress more than inspire if their dominance continues to go unchallenged.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of these new images taken by Lewis, that these rules are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

I exorcised this conflict in my own mind by experimenting with the many rejected images from this first shoot that I felt better represented Lewis more fully but I felt I was unable to present this work publicly without Lewis’s full complicity. The concept of the SELFIE project was born from the realisation, that Lewis not only should be part of the conversation but should be the owner of the work.

I contacted Lewis in 2020 and shared my thoughts and feelings and invited him to re-visit the original portrait session but with him in control. At this point Lewis disclosed to me that he had been told that he would never be able to take a selfie.

The acceptance by Lewis that he would not be able to participate in what is considered by all of us to be such a common act is an indication of the insidious nature of gaslighting that exists culturally in society’s boundaries of what is considered normal. In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us – not just Lewis – he’s our poster boy. I believe that as artists, we can enable others who might feel excluded literally or within their own minds, we are sending ripples in the zeitgeist, challenging the insidious pressures that subjugate and limit progress towards a more inclusive and empathic society. Whilst SELFIE as a project accepts the difficult existential reality that we are arbiters of our own fate, Lewis is also enabled.

The improvement of society can only be achieved by first recognising those damaging inherited attributes that prevent us from seeing the gifts and talents of ‘others’, previously considered ‘less-able’ or disabled.

This project ‘Selfie’ is a therapeutic act for us both. It recognises Lewis’s individual needs, simply by enabling him to participate in such a basic photographic act denied to him. The physical images created and brought to the public realm remind us of how we take so much of our existence – our every movement – for granted. Lewis can teach us so much about our attitude to our own lives and the self-harm that comes from the impossibility of competing with the oppressive and impossible boundaries of conventional beauty.  Bringing all aspects of his life to us, challenging the rules that define photographic practice remind us of our privilege. Observing the sheer effort required by Lewis in focusing every element of his being into targeting his finger to activate the tiny button of the trigger is personally deeply humbling and his images are testament as well as a documentation of the supreme human effort that is required by all of us to survive in the world.

Documentation – Royal Photographic Society lecture and exhibition at Mother London