Luke Swenson

Luke Swenson grew up in southwest Washington state along the Columbia River, and at the age of eighteen relocated to New York City. There, he photographed the Black and Afro-American community of Bedford-Stuyvesant and the legacy of jazz music within American culture in his first long-term project Brownstone Jazz. In 2012, Swenson turned his focus towards the hip hop community, and the historic neighborhoods that make up Brooklyn and southside Chicago. The resulting project, Gold Land, explores the structural racism inherent within these urban environments, and the culture of hyper-masculinity and violence. One year later, Swenson graduated with honors from Pratt Institute with a BFA in Photography. In 2017, Swenson made his first visit to the US-Mexico border in the wake of the growing humanitarian crisis. That same year, Swenson co-founded the community-based visual storytelling project Atascosa Borderlands with writer and naturalist Jack Dash, documenting a remote 42-mile stretch of the Arizona-Sonora border with an interactive multimedia website. His photographs are a part of the permanent collection the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. Swenson was awarded a Director's Fellowship at the International Center of Photography, where he completed his one-year certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Storytelling in December 2023. He is based in Tucson, Arizona.