Known and Strange Things Pass is about the deep and complex entanglement of technology with contemporary life. It’s 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. Eugenie Shinkle, 1000 Words Magazine

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Known and Strange Things Pass

Hardcover, 184 pages, 320mm x 240mm

€40

Available from publisher Skinnerboox

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Edition of 100

10x8in print of your choice on hahnemühle paper

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The photographs in this work are taken on either side of the Atlantic in places where the Internet is concentrated. Where the fibres come together, and almost everything we do online passes down a few impossibly narrow tubes, stretching along the seabed, connecting one continent to another.

Looking at these vast unknowable entities – the ocean and the Internet – we sense their strangeness. We can understand each conceptually but can only ever see or bump into small bits of them. They challenge our everyday assumptions and show us that the boundaries we put between things are more permeable than we might like to think. That the objects surrounding us daily, appearing so reliable and mundane, are actually parts of much larger, more complex, bodies extended across space and time.

The work is structured through the push and pull of intermeshing sequences. Things, in different times and places, intertwine and coexist. As we look closer, worlds we think of as separate dissolve into each other – the near and the distant, the ocean and the internet, the physical and the virtual, what we think of as natural with the cultural and technological.

Book: Known and Strange Things Pass is published by Skinnerboox

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

Acquisition: The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, installation of 20 framed prints (sizes 144x108cm to 28x21cm). On display from November 2021- November 2022 (click image below to see more)

Solo Show: Known and Strange Things Pass at Robert Morat Gallery, Berlin, 3rd September - 30 October 2021 (click image below to see more)

Group Show: Known and Strange Things Pass at C/O Berlin in Songs of the Sky, Photography & The Cloud⁠. 11/12/2021 - 21/04/22 (click image below to see more)

“As the ocean meets the shore it exists, for a moment, in an unsettled form, a liquid mass leavened with air and transformed into foam. Known and Strange Things Pass is a meditation on the complex ecstasy bound up with this fluidity, this passage from one state to another.“

You can read the full essay here

Interview: Known and Strange Things Pass in Der Greif