Dag Alveng was born in Oslo in 1953. He gave up his medical training to study photography at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham, England, under Thomas J. Cooper, Paul Hill, and Christopher Seiberling from 1975-1976. In 1977, with Tom Sandberg, Alveng founded the Fotogalleriet in Oslo, one of the first photography galleries in Scandinavia. As Alveng explains, "We wanted to bring important work to Norway, and showed people like Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, and other contemporary photography. We paid the rent ourselves and worked for free." Alveng lives and works in Oslo.

In 2020-2021, the Telemark Kunstmuseum commissioned Dag Alveng to create an exhibition and accompanying catalogue of photographs to celebrate the preservation of the historic Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site in Telemark, Norway, which was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015.

Faithful to the analog tradition, Alveng exposes his images on sheet film using an 8 x 10" Deardorff view camera.  His negatives are developed by hand, and his prints are made on gelatin-silver fiber paper using an 8 x 10" enlarger and processed in a wet darkroom.  As a result, his photographs have luminous presence.

Alveng's earlier monographs include Asylum (1987), Layers of Light (1995), Summer Light (2001), This is MOST Important -- The New York Multiple Exposure Series (2003), Racing (2012), Summer Light (2013), Wilse -- The Humanist and His Lab (2015), and Still Time (2018).

Alveng's photographs have been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums.  They are held in numerous institutional collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The New York Public Library; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, Sweden; Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway; Henie-Onstad Art Center, Høvikodden, Norway; Museum for Photography, Odense, Denmark; The National Museum of Photography / Preus Photomuseum, Norway; The Art Collection of the City of Oslo, Stenersenmuseet, Norway; The Art Collection of the Norwegian Council of Cultural Affairs, Norway; and in private and corporate collections including Norsk Hydro, Norway; Statoil, Norway; Bank of America, Chicago, IL; Reader's Digest Collection, Pleasantville, NY; Joseph T. Baio Collection, NY; Holly Solomon Collection, NY; SAS Collection, Stockholm, Sweden; Storebrand Art Collection, Norway; Olav Løkke Collection, Norway; and the ABG Sundal Collier Collection, Norway.