Andy Sewell

Andy Sewell (born 1978) is a British photographer, living in London. He has produced the books The Heath about Hampstead Heath in north London; Something like a Nest (2014) about "the redundancy of the ideas we have about the pastoral as they come up against modern life" in the English countryside; and Known and Strange Things Pass (2020), about transatlantic communications cables and "the deep and complex entanglement of technology with contemporary life".

Work The Heath, made over five years and self-published, shows an "affectionate ramble" on Hampstead Heath in north London. According to Sean O'Hagan writing in The Guardian, The Heath captures the "hinterland between the created and the natural [. . . ] This is 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." Parr and Badger include it in the third volume of their photobook history.

Something like a Nest is set in farming and family surroundings in the contemporary English countryside (2009–2013). Lucy Davies in the British Journal of Photography wrote that "for Sewell, the English countryside seemed as much an airy, shape-shifting construct as a physical entity, often thought of in a particular, bucolic way, but as connected to 21st century global capitalism as anywhere else." O'Hagan wrote again in The Guardian that "Sewell makes us think more deeply about what the countryside means by attending to aspects of the rural landscape we often overlook, either because they do not fit our definitions or because we no longer spend enough time there to absorb the changes that have crept into our still green and pleasant, but increasingly managed and manicured, land. [. . . ] Formally, Sewell's outdoor landscapes seldom spell anything out, his eye often lighting on small details that suggest the bigger picture."

Publications The Heath. Self-published, 2011. . With an introduction by Sewell and a poem by Owen Shears ("Heath"). Edition of 850 copies. Something like a Nest. Self-published, 2014. . With text by Ben Platts-Mills. Known and Strange Things Pass. Marche, Italy: Skinnerboox, 2020. . With essays by Eugenie Shinkle and Sewell. Edition of 800 copies.

Collections Victoria and Albert Museum, London Museum of London, London National Science and Media Museum, Bradford