Richard Ansett — Community — Lewis Fisher's SELFIE at Royal Photographic Society and Mother London

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.

During this first shoot I was greatly conflicted by the requirement to capture an image of him that would represent disability in a way that seemed in conflict with Lewis’s reality. I found myself negotiating around Lewis’s involuntary movements associated with his Cerebral Palsy, in the hope of capturing a ‘palatable’ image that represented him in a way that conformed to able bodied expectations. 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 movement and in doing so denying his right to be himself. I was complicit in a form of normative gaslighting that I felt contributed to a potential harming relationship to his own positive 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, not knowing how I would ever use them.

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.

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 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 by doctors that he would never be able to take a selfie. We set out to prove them wrong.

In this work, we are highlighting the silent oppressive nature of societal cultural expectations on all of us. Artists can enable others through collaboration, 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 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.

Lewis and I posit in the presentation of the new images shot by him and assisted by Richard Ansett, that the rules that define our beauty and worth are not only archaic but are exclusionary.

SELFIE was exhibited at Mother London and the Royal Photographic Society and published in the RPS Journal, Lewis spoke about his experience at the Royal Photographic Society and Mother London.

WATCH this short film documentation of Lewis capturing his first Selfies