Andy Sewell’s work can be found in the collections of the V&A Museum, Tate Gallery, MAST Foundation, Columbia University Art Collection and the Museum of London, among others.
His work uncovers feelings of immersion, fragility, connection, and possibility. It questions assumed boundaries and looks at the relationships between the ideas we hold about the world and our embodied experience of it.
He has been the subject of solo shows in USA, France, Italy, Poland, Germany, China, and South Korea and has been nominated for Oskar Barnack Award, Prix Pictet, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. He is the winner of the International Photobook Award and is included in Martin Parr’s The Photobook: A History Vol. III. He has been an artist in residence at Columbia University’s Heyman Center and a visiting lecturer at Columbia, Trinity College Cambridge, University of the Arts London, Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, and London School of Economics.
The Heath is about the paradox of a place managed to feel wild. Something Like a Nest explores the gap between the countryside as an idea, somewhere often imagined and depicted as an escape from modernity, and the messier, enmeshed landscape we find there. Known and Strange Things Pass looked at the relationship, physical and metaphorical, between the ocean and the internet. London Altarpiece is a response to policies of austerity articulated through relationships between ecclesiastical architecture and contemporary food distribution in churches converted into food banks during the pandemic. Why are things this way? is a participatory project, unpacking assumptions about the cost of living crisis and about whose voices we get to hear. His latest work, Slowly and Then All at Once, asks questions about power, hope, and interrelation through the frame of climate breakdown.
Exhibitions and Awards
Slowly and Then All at Once. Fondazione Palazzo Magnani / Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2025.
Slowly and Then All at Once. Nominated for Prix Pictet, 2025
Why are Things This Way, London School of Economics, 2024
Known and Strange Things Pass, PH Museum, Bologna, 2023
Known and Strange Things Pass, Known and Strange: Photographs from the Collection, V&A Museum, 2021 - 2023
Known and Strange Things Pass, PhMuseum, Bologna, 2023
London Altarpiece, Museum of London, set of three triptychs, 2023
Known and Strange Things Pass, 20 print installation acquired by V&A Museum, London, 2021
Known and Strange Things Pass, Robert Morat Gallery, 2021
Known and Strange Things Pass, long-listed for Oskar Barnack Award 2021
Known and Strange Things Pass, long-listed for Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, 2021
Something like a Nest, Positive Pleasure, Dong Gang Museum of Photography, South Korea, 2021
Known and Strange Things Pass, Backlight Festival, Finland, 2020
Something like a Nest, The British at Home, a political history, Les Rencontres d'Arles, 2019
Known and Strange Things Pass, 22 print acquisition by MAST Foundation, Italy. 2020
Something like a Nest, Gallery Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow Photo Month, 2019
The Heath, Londons Hidden Rivers, The Museum of London, 2019
Known and Strange Things Pass, Lianzhou Festival, China, 2018
Something like a Nest, ‘Here We Are’, Rue Béranger, Paris, 2018
Something like a Nest, A Green and Pleasant Land; British Landscape and the Imagination: 1970s to Now, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, 2017.
Something like a Nest, ‘Here We Are’, Old Sessions House, London, 2017
Something like a Nest, Creating the Countryside, Compton Verney Gallery, 2017
Something like a Nest, Robert Morat Gallery, Photo London, 2016
Something like a Nest, Heyman Center, New York, 2016
Artist in residence at Columbia University’s Heyman Center, New York, 2016
Something like a Nest named one of the best photobooks of 2014 in photoeye lists, 2014
Something like a Nest, James Hyman Gallery, Paris Photo, 2014
Something like a Nest, James Hyman Gallery, London, 2014
The Heath, included in The Photobook: A History Volume III by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, 2014
Participant at Photobook Bristol, 2013
The Heath, Google, London, 2013
Something like a Nest, Le Centre d’Art GwinZegal, France, 2013
The Heath, Robert Morat Gallery, Unseen, Amsterdam, 2012
The Heath, Robert Morat Gallery, Hamburg, 2012
The Heath will be shown as part of the Noorderlicht Photofestival 2012
The Heath exhibited at the International Photobook Festival at Le Bal, Paris, 2012
The Heath wins International Photobook Award 2012
Inclusion in and jury prize at Plat(t)form 2012 at Fotomuseam Winterthur, 2012
The Heath named one of the best photobooks of 2011 in The Guardian and by Photobookstore and has two selections in the photoeye lists, 2011
The Heath, James Hyman Gallery, Paris Photo, 2011
Selected by Martin Parr as “a photographer likely to make his mark on the future of photography” for an exhibition at Krakow Photo Month, 2010
Included in the book Flash Forward, “a review of emerging talents”, 2009
Winner Magenta Award 2007
The Heath, London Stories Exhibition, Shoreditch Town Hall, London. October 2006
Collections
V&A Museum, MAST Foundation, National Media Museum, Museum of London, Columbia University Art Collection, Eric Franck Collection, Martin Parr Collection, Hyman Collection.
Professional Clients
FT Weekend Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, New York Times Magazine, WSJ Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine, Guardian Weekend, GQ, PORT, Esquire, Independent Magazine, Independent on Sunday Review, The Observer, Food Illustrated, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, Phaidon, Laurence King, Bloomsbury.
Books
The Heath, 2011
Selected reviews
“a book of suggestion, a landscape of the imagination as well as a record of a real and familiar place. A classic of understated observation.” The Guardian
“At seventy-five and with the world the way that it is, I sometimes come close to losing heart, but when I see work like this I’m back in the game. The Heath is a beautiful job. Honest about mixed evidence… open to both joy and sorrow. Robert Adams
“a series of photographs that have uncovered the subtle beauty of the terrain, as well as his personal maturity in photographic approach. The photographer’s intelligent portrayal of his subject isn’t for the casual viewer, but rather for those who appreciate the challenge of consuming the complexities a powerful narrative.” photoeye Magazine
“For the last five years Andy Sewell has been tramping Hampstead Heath with his camera and has accumulated a stunning set of photographs… I urge you to support this emerging talent and order this book before it is acknowledged as a classic contribution to our photographic culture.” Martin Parr
“With a quiet, precise and sometimes playful eye Andy Sewell’s photographs negotiate this shared territory of the heath’s managed wilderness. While using his camera to frame the “still moments” a place like the heath can gift us, he never allows us to forget the human presence woven through the DNA of its existence.” Financial Times
Something like a Nest, 2014
Selected reviews
“He doesn’t want to shatter our illusions, merely quieten them – to allow us to see the complexity of what’s before us.” Financial Times
“A sustained visual meditation on the contemporary English countryside – a place defined by often conflicting social and economic interests, and our reluctantly surrendered received notions of the pastoral and the sublime. Sewell makes us think more deeply about what the countryside means”
The Guardian
“such is the assurance of Sewell’s vision and strength of narrative quality that. . . our perception roams freely, gradually absorbing the rich suggestiveness of the people, places and environments. . . a clever, multi-layered look at our idea of rural life, done with understatement and visual acuity.”
a-n
“matured from a tradition focused on landscape towards photography as metaphor”.
American Suburb X
“a quiet, sophisticated book . . . With its multi-layered approach, it’s neither predictable nor didactic”
photo-eye
“a series of intensely concentrated impressions that rewards, indeed encourages, a slow, measured drinking-in.” British Journal of Photography
“The odd yet unmistakeable character of English country life is revealed in an evocative new series of photographs” The Telegraph
“a delicate portrayal of today’s English countryside. The artist explores how our idea of this land, and the pastoral symbolism related to it, intersects with contemporary culture. Sewell goes beyond the clichés in order to create a visual experience in which the noise of contemporary life melts into bucolic conventions and habits.” Fantom
“a poetic re-framing – both literal and metaphorical – of the English countryside. Employing a subtle and contemplative pictorial style. . . [an] unsentimental and complex vision of rural life. ”
photography| writing| landscape
Known and Strange Things Pass, 2021
Selected reviews
“Known and Strange Things Pass, looks at what lies beneath our online life. . . exploring the physical and metaphorical entanglement of the ocean and the internet.” The Guardian
“It is about the immediacy of touch and the commonplace miracle of action at a distance; the porosity of the boundaries that hold things apart, and the fragility of the bonds that lock them together. . . The ostensible subject is the transatlantic communications cables linking the UK and North America. But the cables are only one thread in a web of analogy that explores what it means to be in the world at the present moment.” Eugenie Shinkle, 1000 Words Magazine
“Andy Sewell pushes the boundaries of documentary photography telling a story between the visible and the invisible.” Vogue Italia
Andy’s photography possesses a very strong narrative capacity, but a silent one. His images are very often the white space between two words, the moment of turning a page within a story, what happens while blinking. . . This book is one of those rare examples in which the design is inseparable from the images – yet they are not in sync, as each follows its own baseline. As if reproducing the myriad of storylines going each given moment through each fibre of that underwater cable, different narratives chase each other and play in relay through the pages. . . Andy Sewell adds with his body of work a chapter in the conversation on picturing the invisible. . . he does so by making use of the missing parts. The empty space. The glitchy space, the non linear sequences forcing us to go back again, to look again, more carefully. Elisa Medde, C4 Jouranl
“A remarkable, multivalent study” British Journal of Photography
“Turning the pages I felt a unique sense of floating, inorganic images interspersed from time to time brought me back to the material world, I was in a strange fluctuation. It is the reality of our life today. . . This is a book that will make us think again about the world we live in.” Rinko Kawauchi
“Magnificent, a compelling and complex work” David Campany