The Sydney Morning Herald - Linda Morris – Wednesday May 19, 2010

Linda Morris

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IT was an exercise in extremepatience when the photographer Dean Sewell set out to document the red-brick walk-ups of his youth in suburban Hillsdale.

Known for his narratives of warand marginalised peoples in East Timor,Aceh, Chechnya and Redfern, where images needed no construction, Sewell found himself frustratingly beholden to the vagaries of light and weather when he experimented with the abstracted red block colours of inner-suburban landscapes.

‘‘It drove me insane, waiting for people to walk into the light,’’ Sewell says. ‘‘I had six months of the year when the light was right, when the wind was prevailing west and blew the worst of the pollution to give the sky the crispness I wanted, and I only photographed between 2pm and 4pm each day.

‘‘On average over five years –there are 20 pictures in the series– I took four pictures a year. I can only remember two days in fiveyears when I knew I got two pictures from the day.’’

The Hillsdale colour study forms part of Sewell’s first major solo exhibition and his first for the Charles Hewitt Gallery, a portfolio of 10 years of work which, as the title Dystopia hints, is a somewhat mournful meditation on our ruraland urban landscape.

Sewell’s surrealistic image of a kangaroo carcass immolated to aglazed porcelain veneer in a fire ravaged paddock is familiar to those who have followed the talented 10 of the Oculi collective, and its recent survey exhibition at the Manly Gallery. Sewell is the group’s co-founder.

It forms the background to the tragic loss of life in the Canberra bushfires, the gaze of this newsroom-bred photographer for The Sydney Morning Herald for once resting not on human wreckage but on the larger horror wrought on the environment.

‘‘Whereas there was a lot of focus on the loss of life, and there was agood reason for it, I wasn’t shootinga news picture, I was interested in what was left behind.’’

The same is true for Sewell’s landscape Burning Palms, in which a grass field in outer Sydney becomes a patchwork offire, ash and embers.

‘‘I remember the grass combusting because it was so dry. The air was supercharged, there was zero humidity and the grass was igniting in patterns. ‘‘I was looking at a visceral vision of the fire. It was reacting differently . . . racing across grassy fields and then dropping back into the thickets.’’