Arne Svenson:

The Neighbors

After receiving a bird-watching telephoto lens from a friend, Arne Svenson set up a tripod to capture what unfolded within a glass-and-steel high-rise building across the street from his Tribeca studio in New York. Capturing the lives of his neighbors (their habits, activities, tastes) over the course of a year, Svenson also used the geometry of the buildings’ windows as his frame, documenting various tableaux of domestic life unfolding. Presenting over 20 photographs from The Neighbors series, this exhibition explored the central issues raised by these enigmatic works: voyeurism, the increasingly imperceptible boundaries between privacy and the public, and the ubiquity of the camera in our surveillance-obsessed world.

Documentation of a court case brought against the artist (which he successfully won and which was reaffirmed by an appellate court in 2015) enriched this discussion about the uniquely modern tension between the luxury of looking out and the vulnerability of being looked upon.

Arne Svenson was born in 1952 in Santa Monica, California. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; UMC Art Gallery, University of Colorado, Boulder; Western Project, Los Angeles; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, Denmark; and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oregon. He lives and works in New York, New York.