ARTIST STATEMENT

Seb Agnew is an artist working in staged and conceptual photography, based in Hamburg, Germany. He builds the worlds he photographs – either transforming real locations or constructing them from scratch as miniature sets – and stages them with cinematic light and meticulous detail. Each image holds a human presence: sometimes a figure, sometimes only the trace it leaves behind, sometimes a body formed from the very material that surrounds it.

 

Disorientation and the search for meaning run through everything he creates. Ordinary spaces overflow – with objects, with matter, with meaning – until the boundary between the self and its surroundings begins to dissolve. Each setting seems familiar before it tips into something dreamlike and uncanny, caught between order and overload.

 

Agnew laid the foundation for this practice while studying Audiovisual Media (B.Eng.) in Stuttgart, where he specialised in photography and digital post-production. He went on to complete a Master of Education (M.Ed.) at the University of Hamburg and now also trains the next generation of photographers as a vocational school teacher.

Seb Agnew: Portrait

Selected
Awards

  • 2023 — Belfast Photo Festival, Shortlisted Artist
  • 2021 — Aesthetica Art Prize, Shortlisted Artist
  • 2020 — Photolucida’s Critical Mass, Finalist
  • 2020 & 2017 — Chromatic Photo Awards, 1st Place (Conceptual)

Selected
Publications

  • 2024 — Dodho Magazine, Fine Art Book
  • 2023 — “Dämmerschlaf”, exhibition catalogue (solo exhibition, Fabrik der Künste, Hamburg)
  • 2023 — “ANGST – crisis indicator or survival instinct?”, exhibition catalogue (Walkmühle, Wiesbaden)
  • 2022 — fotoMAGAZIN, Issue 8/2022
  • 2022 — Wiesbaden Photo Days: “Turbulent Times”, exhibition catalogue
  • 2021 — Aesthetica Future Now Anthology
  • 2020 — Dodho Magazine, Issue 12

Selected
Exhibitions

  • 2026 — Aesthetica Art Prize 20, Woodend Gallery, Scarborough
  • 2024 — FORMAT24: Future Now, FORMAT Festival, Leicester
  • 2023 — Goethe-Institut Sydney (Head On Photo Festival), Sydney
  • 2023 — »ANGST«, Walkmühle, Wiesbaden
  • 2023 — Dämmerschlaf (solo exhibition), Fabrik der Künste, Hamburg
  • 2022 — frauen museum wiesbaden (Wiesbaden Photo Days), Wiesbaden
  • 2021 — Aesthetica Art Prize, York Art Gallery, York
  • 2021 — Zusammen: Let’s Go, BBA Gallery, Berlin

Selected
Press