Born in Manhattan, New York Carl, his younger sister and brother were raised by their maternal Grenedian grandmother in Ft. Apache the South Bronx, NYC. A member of the last Boarding Class of the Choir School of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, one of the top 5 male choirs in the world at the time, he attended the USAF School of Health Care Sciences graduating as a Lab Technician and becoming a Histopathology Technician (youngest Supervisor of a Pathology lab in the USAF at that time).
Initially a Classically-trained vocalist, Mr. Lewis began his visual arts career in photography in the mid-1970s post his military career. The impetus to 'photo-graph' began as needing imagery that dovetailed with his poetics. To date he has created thousands of works which demonstrate and, in many cases combine, the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of his body of work.
With a minimal exhibition track record that masquerades as the tip of his 45-year body of work (yet to be seen or surveyed in its entirety) Djinn né Carl E. Lewis is an autodidactic, multi-disciplinary, conceptual artist known for his two- and three-dimensional photoworks and abstractions featuring laser imagery and the use of Old World surface treatments.

Carl 'captured' 20x40 foot, live in-concert laser imagery in 1979-80 with an analog camera and slow film in 1979-90 images from this facet of his work are represented in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum and Schomburg Collection of the Library of the City of New York. Other images from his oeuvre are in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Schomburg Collection of the Library of the City of New York, the Anacostia Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. He is referenced in Deb Willis' 'Reflections in Black: a History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present'.

“Esoteric sigils and symbolism of ancient cultures, sacred geometry, arcane, and al khemical elements have been integral in my work since the early '80s. As an adult my research expanded searching for commonalities between cultures, belief systems, signs, sigils and symbols, and finding a way to incorporating those elements into the work.

A significant aspect of the work involves 'found' imagery, or maybe imagery that 'finds' me, 'Urban tableaus speak to me. I can be driving down the street and something reaches out and taps me on my brain guiding me to a conversation between materials.' Between 'real life' 'found' imagery, digitally-constructed surrealistic tableaus, and 3D assemblages, the works blend photographic sources from my imajBanq extracting slices from their original context similar to the 'Tumbler' painters who used wood veneers cut on the bias to create their paintings. I combine disparate elements weaving them into a unified whole seeing and presenting my 'Verse.” - DCL
More information can be found through Marquis' Who's Who.