Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg is seen here with her eyes closed, as she is arrested by London Metropolitan Police while protesting an oil industry conference—a striking triptych image from Andy Sewell’s new series, Slowly and Then All at Once that recently premiered at Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy. She is the youngest-ever Time Person of the Year, appearing on the cover accompanied by the caption: ‘The Power of Youth’, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year between 2019 and 2023.

Thunberg is one of many protagonists in the artist’s ambitious collection of photographs, Slowly and Then All at Once, exploring dynamics of power and hope through the frame of climate breakdown. In this work Sewell weaves together photographs of climate protests, with images of climate diplomacy (taken inside UN Climate conferences, COP's, from Glasgow to Dubai) and more personal, everyday images, a kind of visual weather diary of what’s around him day to day. The work is concerned with different forms of power—the top down and the bottom up, the human and the more-than-human—as they shape and are shaped by each other in this time of ecological breakdown. It surfaces important and under-articulated questions: How can we believe in a future that gets better and not worse? When we know what the problems are, and what we need to do to begin addressing them, what prevents those in power from doing what is necessary? How do we respond to the polycrisis we find ourselves within?

At the moment of writing, Greta is aboard the Madleen aid flotilla to challenge the blockade in Gaza, just months after the previous flotilla, Conscience, was bombed by Israel the day it set sail, forcing the mission to end. More power to her. 

ANDY SEWELL's 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. The work brings into relation things we often think of as separate; the ocean and the internet, for example, in Know and Strange Things Pass, and different forms of power—top-down and the bottom up, human and the more than human in Slowly and then All at Once. His 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. 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.

TIM CLARK is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words. Alongside the magazine, he is also Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Walter Guadagnini, Director of CAMERA, Torino, and Luce Lebart, curator, historian and researcher at The Archive of Modern Conflict. He has previously been involved in a wide range of projects including curatorial advisor for the Discovery section of Photo London 2022 and 2023 and adjunct curator on Masculinities: Liberation through Photography (2020-22) at the Barbican Centre London, an exhibition which travelled to Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Les Rencontres d’Arles and FOMU Antwerp.