Louis was born in London, grew up in New York City, and has lived in coastal southern California for much of his adult life. Before embarking on his photographic career, he was an internationally eminent and widely published scholar of early modern English literature and cultural theory. He did not take up photography in earnest until early in the digital era but once kindled, his engagement became intense and enduring. Within five years, he had decided to retire from his academic career in order to devote his time and energy to travel and photography.

An abiding interest in the visual arts and architecture helped to shape his sensitivity to issues of composition, form, and tonality in photography. More importantly, his academic concern with how cultural forms and forces are constructed and represented profoundly influenced his approach to photography. The shift from text to image was not a radical break from his prior intellectual pursuits but rather the development, in a new medium, of an enduring interest in cultural narratives and historical identities. His photographs, much like his scholarly work, investigate how people and places are shaped by historical forces, social norms, and cultural practices. Photography afforded him a new way of engaging with these issues, offering a more immediate and visceral connection to his subjects. He has been a freelance travel, documentary and fine art photographer for the past decade and a half, and has worked extensively in south and east Asia, Africa, and Mexico. He works in a number of photographic genres, including street and cityscape, art and architecture, as well as environmental portraiture. The overarching subject of his work, however, is people in the process of living their cultures—that is, at once experiencing, reproducing and transforming the culture in which they are embedded. He conceives of his photographic practice as a kind of visual ethnography; and his constant artistic challenge is to achieve in his images a satisfying meeting point between the documentary and aesthetic dimensions of photography, between the acts of recording and creating.

His photographs have been exhibited in shows in London, Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, and Buenos Aires as well as in California, Colorado, Ohio, and New York. Five of his portfolios have been published in the US fine art photography journal, LensWork. His monograph, Indians at Work: Cultural Portraits, was published in the LensWork Monograph Series in 2017. His photographs have also been featured in Black & White, COLOR, and other fine art photography publications, as well as in Condé Nast Traveler, Lonely Planet Traveler, Digital Camera, and Art and Design (Beijing). In 2010 he received the Pollux Award and was named 2010 Professional Photographer of the Year by the World Photography Gala Awards. He was named Travel Photographer of the Year by TPOTY in London in 2011.