ABOUT

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.