Lewis Khan – ABQ

Images from a series of meaningful encounters with strangers and place, in Albuquerque NM.

For Lewis Khan, photography is a way of being tactile with the world. He is interested in the experiences that the pursuit of taking pictures opens up, and particularly portraits Khan sees as a journey point in a process of a relationship. Khan finds beauty in the overlooked, and uses the medium of photography as a means to form connections with people and places. Khan’s practice is empathetic, documentary in its base, and is a continual search for notions of self within an other.

Drawn to New Mexico by a fascination of the desert, and how western human intervention is interacting with that terrain, upon arrival Khan quickly found an interest in the city of Albuquerque. Focussing his time in this location and around its edges over a two week period, the resulting images are the starting points of a relationship to place. In this untitled series, Situationist ideas around spectacle and the reification of the everyday inform wanderings, encounters, and a connection to the feeling of presence.

By placing himself alone in a new and unfamiliar environment, Khan was seeking a heightened and deliberate way of looking and engaging with his surroundings as he travelled through the city on foot, making serendipitous connections with people and landscape. 

Lewis Khan b.1990 is a photographic artist from London, working with stills and moving image. His portrait based work is a study of emotion, relationships, and identity. Khan’s graduation piece from UWE, Bristol – ‘Georgetown’ (11min , 20sec) was picked up and exhibited widely, notably at The Photographers Gallery as part of Fresh Faced + Wild Eyed, it was also awarded 1st Prize at Shuffle Film Festival by Director Danny Boyle. Following that Khan’s practice has taken him further afield, shooting projects commercially and personally in countries across Europe and The Americas. At the same time as this Khan has undertaken an Artist Residency spanning 4 years across two general London hospitals; The Chelsea & Westminster and the West Middlesex. The resulting project ‘Theatre’ offers a complex web of associations based on the universal human qualities of strength & fragility. The project is situated in the context of the contemporary landscape of UK healthcare; the potential privatisation of the NHS, and the allegorical connection between the immediate themes explored in the project and the unfolding wider political situation.