ASLE SVARVERUD by Leif Preus 2003

A meeting with Asle Svarverud’s photographs is always a richly rewarding experience. His landscapes are striking extracts from the world we live in, from the countryside around us and the nature of which we ourselves form a part. Every photograph signed by Asle Svarverud stands alone and speaks for itself. One sometimes feels that the execution is the actual message, that form and content meld into an aesthetic expression that is to be found in all his pictures, irrespective of motif.

Not all artists who seek pasture in the meadows of photography have sufficient technical proficiency to master the craft. They have to acquire gradually the skills they feel they need. Asle Svarverud has gone about it the opposite way. After 4 years of training as a photographer, he took his qualifying examination with Rude’s Photographers in Oslo in 1971, but it was not until the Spring Photographic Exhibition of 1979 that he exhibited his work for the first time. At a 3-month workshop at the School of Visual Art in New York in 1981 he worked in particular with Ansel Adam’s zone system, which he has fully mastered.

He has been invited no less than three times to exhibit his pictures at the Preus Photo Museum. Among the pictures he showed the first time, in 1983, were a couple of sepia-tinted pictures from a marshy, drowned forest landscape.

They were like poems in which the fallen trees in the water appear to be seeking back to the earth from which they had sprung and received their life.

Asle Svarverud is not revolutionary, not dramatic. His pictures creep under our skins without any help from outside agents. His chief motifs are actually stillness, quiet, harmony, retrospection. In an unrestful world in which “moments follow upon one another so closely that time itself ceases to be”, as social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen puts it, a meeting with Asle Svarverud’s magnificent photographs is sheer balm for the soul.

Leif Preus
Founder of the Norwegian Museum of Photography