Photographer Lewis Khan spent four years in residency at two London hospitals—Chelsea and Westminster and West Middlesex—after receiving a bursary from the Hospital Trust in 2014. Theatre (now in its second edition due to the first selling out) presents a selection of photographs taken over that period, including portraits of staff, patients, and the hospitals themselves. Khan’s most recognisable image from the series is an intimate portrait of ‘Gina’, which made him a winner of the British Journal of Photography’s 2017 Portrait of Britain Prize.
In the first few images, Khan includes a nod to the conventions of the documentary hospital photograph, where dramatic chiaroscuro and emboldened saturation feature on heavy white pages. Where he later takes full advantage of his analogue camera, accentuating pastel tones and soft lighting, Khan’s treatment of his subjects becomes unusual and inviting. Particularly appealing are his people-less interiors: a corridor in which two hospital beds made up with purple-pink sheets rest in front of an abstract painting of dappled greens, blues, yellows, oranges, and whites; and a close-up of a flaxen hospital curtain, its pleats sharp origami folds behind which another painting (this one yellows and greys) looms out of focus.
The subtlety of Khan’s delicate palette is disrupted by two powerful photographs. They are two images of blood, expressive enough to rival the hospitals’ collections of large-scale impastos. In one, blood pours down a plastic curtain. In the other, blood floods the square floor tiles and the white rubber slip-ons of a cropped-out worker encircled by the spiralling golden ratio of their own bloody footprints. Khan’s lens is trained on the blood here and nothing else. There are giant Jupiter’s spots of blood; a burgundy pool of blood congealing in the top left; spatterings of blood on the see-through curtain in the background; wiggly ombre grids of blood imprinted on the speckled lino.
The rich blue of the worker’s scrubs and proud red of the blood lend this photograph, which lacks any context, a quiet, quiet horror. What happened for there to be so much blood? Is this normal? What was the worker thinking? What did all that blood smell like? This image, reminiscent of scenes from small screen serial killer dramas, confrontational and overwhelming for the viewer in their domestic setting, is everyday, normalised, for the worker, even perhaps for the acclimatised Khan. Blood, both horrifying and mundane, flows through the core of Theatre, eventually jettisoning out onto its endpapers and cover. The first edition has a shiny crimson square surgically exposed from underneath a reproduction of Sergey Akopov’s painted grapes on its hardback, linen surface—a continual reminder of our corporeal, sanguine reality. The one we like to forget.
Theatre ticks the boxes for what we expect from hospital documentary work: puts faces to the staff; demythologises hospital practices and technology; humanises patients while refraining from sentimentality or pity—all without minimising the logistical and, increasingly, political obstacles these institutions face. Khan’s success at meeting those requirements is further articulated by Consultant Oncologist Mark Bower and lecturer Jim Campbell in two short essays at the back. What’s more exciting, to me at least, is how Khan brings forth the ambiguous, painterly beauty of the hospitals—and how his attention to detail has been emphasised by the book’s finish: by its gold lettering, handbound spine, artery red bookmark.
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Theatre by Lewis Khan was published by The Lost Light Recordings, 2020. Selected images are presented here courtesy of the artist. Reviewed by Photomonitor.
