This week, both of the artists that I was considering writing about have been previously written about, but somehow both of their more controversial series' have been skipped.
With Arne Svenson's new series, Neighbors, he has turned outward from his usual studio based practice to study the daily activities of his downtown Manhattan neighbors as seen through his windows into theirs. Svenson has always combined a highly developed aesthetic sense viewed from the perspective of social anthropology in his eclectic projects with subjects ranging from prisoners to sock monkeys. His projects are almost always instigated by an external or random experience which brings new objects or equipment into his life- in this case he inherited a bird watching telephoto lens from a friend.
Because of the nature of the work, Neighbors has been met with a lot of controvery. Whenever candind, unconsenting photographs of random people are made, there is always the debate of privacy vs. the photographers freedom of expression. Svenson took the care to obscure the faces of all of his subjects in the photos, but still was faced with a lawsuit after having the images hung in a gallery. The supreme court ruled in favor of Svenson.
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