Insofar as it’s “A photobook about numbers stations, covert transmissions between intelligence agencies and their undercover operatives,” Lewis Bush‘s Shadows of the State is one of the more interesting photobooks in my collection. It’s a one-stop shop for information on all the current and former numbers stations—radio transmissions thought to be used by spies and counterintelligence agencies—around the world: a short history of the station and description of its typical broadcasts; google earth screen grabs of the likely/known broadcasting locations; links and barcodes that point to online recordings of the broadcasts; and even spectrograms Bush made from some bits of transmission from them.

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Advanced, Global Capitalism has no memory, no sense of nostalgia, no concern for the patina on things, the traces of presence over generations. Nowhere is this more visible than in cities, where all the old, vacant garment factories and bakeries and tenements are long gone, replaced by glittering high rises.

Metropole is Lewis Bush’s dirge against this incessant growth, a lament for all the lost spaces. 

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A City of Dust is a sort of New Topographics newspaper from Lewis Bush, that he claims is a sort of visual memory palace, compiled to aid in delivering a carefully researched speech that will never be given, “… a series of markers and fragments, guides to a greater whole which, like the past, can never be reconstituted.”

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