ArtistNorwegian
Dag Thorenfeldt
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Dag Eivind Thorenfeldt was born in 1961 and lives and works between Hvaler and Oslo, Norway. He came of age professionally in the 1980s as a staff photographer for VG, Norway's largest-circulation print newspaper, spending six years learning to work fast and with purpose in the daily press before striking out independently in 1990.
Since leaving VG, Thorenfeldt has built a practice that balances commercial commissions with sustained personal projects. His editorial clients have included Norway's leading advertising agencies and a broad range of national newspapers and magazines, but it is his long-form photographic work that has drawn sustained critical attention. He works primarily in black-and-white gelatin silver, a medium that suits the quiet intensity characteristic of his portraits.
Thorenfeldt's 1994 series documenting musicians of the Stavanger Symfoniorkester is among his most widely exhibited bodies of work. The images were sold through Bonhams and brought his name to international collectors for the first time. The series captures orchestral musicians in unguarded moments, the geometry of instrument cases and rehearsal spaces forming a counterpoint to the expressiveness of the human subjects.
Perhaps the most sustained project of Thorenfeldt's career is a long portrait series of the Norwegian pop singer and Eurovision figure Jahn Teigen. From the moment the two met in 1990 until Teigen's death in 2014, Thorenfeldt photographed him repeatedly, accumulating an archive that reads as both a friendship document and a study of public persona over time. The complete series was exhibited in a joint sales exhibition at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, where individual prints sold for between NOK 4,200 and NOK 30,000.
Thorenfeldt's work has entered major institutional and private collections including the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg, the Preus Photo Museum (Norway's national photography museum) in Horten, the Moeller Collection, the Seaborn Collection, and the Miami Collection. His presence in Scandinavian auction records is concentrated at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, which has handled all eleven known lots to date.
He has also worked as a nature photographer alongside his son Axel Thorenfeldt, and the two have appeared together as guest lecturers at the Norsk Naturfotofestival, demonstrating the range of a practice that has never settled into a single genre.