Arne Svenson: A Beautiful Day
Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present a new series of color photographs by New York City-based photographer Arne Svenson titled “A Beautiful Day”. Featuring images taken by Svenson from his apartment windows in Tribeca during the height of Covid-19 lockdowns, the exhibition is available online and in-person at Robert Klein Gallery from January 15 – March 18.
Whether he is photographing sock monkeys, expansive landscapes, or unaware New Yorkers, photographer Arne Svenson looks beyond his subjects to seek out universal truths in the images he captures.
The works on view in “A Beautiful Day” are a natural continuation of Svenson’s controversial series “The Neighbors,” in which he photographed residents of a floor-to-ceiling glass apartment through their windows. Although their identities were obscured—“I was not photographing these subjects as specific, identifiable personages, but more as representations of humankind, of all of us” Svenson said—the opening of the show at Julie Saul Gallery in 2013 came with a lawsuit against Svenson that claimed invasion of privacy among other charges.
Svenson fought these claims later that year and again in 2015: “Defending myself against these charges was one of the greatest challenges of my life, but given censorship as the alternative, I had no choice,” he said.
Now in “A Beautiful Day,” Svenson’s vantage point is the same, but his lens is focused elsewhere: Through two windows, one facing North and one facing West in his Tribeca studio.
Although he hadn’t planned to continue focusing his lens on anonymous subjects, the onset of Covid-19 made the project “a necessity” for him. Not many passersby came through the neighborhood during city-wide mandates to stay at home, but for this reason, exactly, the visual stories told by those Svenson photographed are compelling. A man walks by reading a thick book; someone pauses to snap a picture of a tree blooming with white flowers; a pair of stick-thin legs pause in a ballet class-ready first position.
Of both series, Svenson emphasizes, “My aim remains the same: to capture those seemingly banal behaviors in which we all engage and to reveal the wonder, mystery, and beauty of them.”
The works will be on view online and at the gallery until February 26, 2022
About the Author
First and foremost in Arne Svenson’s practice is to seek out the inner life, the essence, of his subjects, whether they be human, inanimate, or something in between. He uses his camera as a reporter uses text, to create a narrative that facilitates the understanding of that which may lie hidden or obscured. This narrative, at times only a whisper or suggestion, weaves throughout his divergent body of work.
Arne Svenson is a self-taught photographer with an educational and vocational background in special education. His photographs have been shown extensively in the United States, Europe, and Asia and are included in numerous public and private collections, including SFMOMA, Carnegie Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Norton Museum of Art. Svenson’s work has been reviewed/profiled in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and The New Yorker, among other publications. In 2016 he received the prestigious Nannen Prize in photojournalism for his project The Neighbors.
Svenson is the author/photographer of numerous books, including Unspeaking Likeness, The Neighbors, Prisoners, and Sock Monkeys (200 out of 1,863). Recent solo exhibitions were at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO, (2016); Western Gallery + Public Art Collection, Western Washington University, WA, (2017) and a two-person show with the work of Andre Kertesz at Galerie Miranda, Paris (2019).
In the years 2012-1016, Svenson was artist-in-residence at Wesley Spectrum High School, a program in Pittsburgh for children on the autism spectrum. In partnership with The Andy Warhol Museum and the Cognitive Psychology Department at the University of Victoria, BC, he was involved in a long-term project exploring the science of facial recognition skills with subjects on the spectrum. The resultant work was shown in its entirety at The Andy Warhol Museum.
Over the past few years, Svenson has given numerous lectures in universities and museums, mostly on the issue of free speech in the arts and how this topic relates to his series The Neighbors, the subject of a protracted legal battle. He was the defendant in a lawsuit involving privacy issues and therefore uniquely qualified to speak about the ramifications of censorship and the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment.
ARNE SVENSON: A BEAUTIFUL DAY
JANUARY 15 – MARCH 19, 2022
Robert Klein Gallery – Boston – USA
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