Introduction
In Jan Troell’s movie Maria Larssons evige øyeblikk (Everlasting Moments, 2008), set in early twentieth-century Sweden, we encounter Maria Larsson, a young working-class woman and mother of seven children. She is trapped in a difficult marriage with a violent and alcoholic husband. However, one day her life changes radically after winning a camera in the lottery. This becomes the point of departure for building a career as a professional studio photographer. The film director Troell, who based his account on a true story, shows how photography not only provides a woman from a modest social background with an income of her own, but also allows his protagonist, Maria, to acquire professional and social self-esteem; a new way of looking at and addressing the world around her; and the possibility of giving voice to the voiceless. What she gains by means of the camera is, in short, independence.
In line with Troell, Striving for Independence explores how photography in the decades before and after 1900 became a tool for women’s independence in the Nordic countries: Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. However, while Troell’s primary focus is the story of one woman’s shift in social status and her process of gaining agency, we aim at presenting a wider range of stories about the photographic culture that early women photographers in the Nordic countries, such as Maria Larsson, established. Some were working-class women, who like her experienced upward social mobility by becoming a photographer. Others belonged to social strata in which they were at liberty to search for alternative ways of living beyond the restrains of bourgeois domesticity.
As the Swedish art historian Lena Johannesson noted more than twenty years ago: “Women’s role as photographers and practitioners behind the camera, as opposed to in front of it, is a dramatic, emancipatory, and yet obscure history of survival.”1 That it is also an under-researched history, the editors of this volume, as former author and editor of extensive surveys of the Norwegian and Danish histories of photography, are the first to admit. Even if some women photographers are mentioned in the existing Nordic national surveys, more substantial research efforts on the many women who worked as
1 Lena Johannesson, “Photo Exile: On the European Experience and Women Photographers in Germany and Sweden,” in Women Photographers: European Experience, eds. Lena Johannesson and Gunilla Knape (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2004), 17.
photographers in the Nordic countries have not so far been undertaken. It was indeed the experience of encountering such research lacunas while working on these surveys that initiated this volume. We are however very much in debt to the pioneering efforts that have already been done in this field by other Nordic scholars, such as Lena Johannesson and Gunilla Knape’s Women Photographers: European Experience (2004).2 Another pioneer that should be mentioned is Eva Dahlman, who has done extensive work on Swedish women photographers and has co-authored the recent volume Kvinnor bakom kameran 1848–1968 (Women behind the camera 1848–1868, 2024).3 Over the last twenty years, a number of journal articles and book chapters on individual photographers have also been published, many of which we refer to in different chapters of this volume.
On the international level, surveys from Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography. From 1839 to the Present Day (1937) to Michel Frizot’s edited volume A New History of Photography (1994) have in general accentuated works by male innovators. Even though a chapter in this volume, authored by Mike Weaver, for example, mentions two early women photographers, Julia Margaret Cameron and Lady Clementina Hawarden, they come across as exceptions that prove the rule: Hawarden is merely represented through one of her photographs, and strangely not presented in the text. Cameron is given more space, but her contribution to the history of photography is largely defined through her relationship to two male characters—her husband and her friend—who are personified as nothing less than art and science:
Cameron, born in Calcutta, was married to Art in the person of her husband who had written a treatise on the sublime and beautiful, and to Science in the person of Sir John Herschel, who had discovered the photographic use of hypo and sent her Talbotypes as early as 1848.4
Newhall’s and Frizot’s highly influential surveys thus exemplify the canonization processes that Griselda Pollock has criticized as a modern construct which naturalizes the male European in an exclusive and highly normative way.5 However, even before the publication of Frizot’s widespread and comprehensive volume, histories on women photographers’ work and their contributions to the history of photography were beginning to emerge. We acknowledge the importance of such studies, for example Val
2 Lena Johannesson and Gunilla Knape, eds., Women Photographers: European Experience (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2004).
3 Björn Axel Johansson, Eva Dahlman, and Magnus Bremmer, Kvinnor bakom kameran 1848–1968 (Malmø: Bokförlaget Arena, 2024).
4 Mike Weaver, “Artistic Aspirations: The Lure of Fine Art,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (Cologne: Köhnemann, 1998), 192.
5 Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (New York and London: Routledge, 1999).
Williams’s The Other Observers: Women Photographers in Britain, 1900 to the Present (1986), where she calls for approaches to the history of women photographers as more than a history of the leisure activities of British nineteenth-century upper-class women:
Women were amongst these early practitioners, taking an active part in all photographic developments during the early years. Yet the customary bias towards the work of men throughout cultural history in general and photographic history in particular has rendered their efforts especially obscure. Some of them had emerged as major artists, used as examples of Victorian practice in most standard works; the majority had been forgotten. Their fascinating history has yet to be fully constructed.6
More recently, several substantial efforts have been made to highlight women photographers through major international exhibitions and surveys, for instance Musée d’Orsay/Musée de l’Orangerie’s Qui a peur des femmes photographes? (Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers?, 2015),7 Emma Lewis’s Photography – A Feminist History (2021), and Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes/A World History of Women Photographers (2021/2022).8 The significance of such volumes is undeniable. Yet, the two works mentioned last present women’s history of photography as a string of carefully selected individual names, whose works are only sparsely contextualized, and at best only loosely connected. As a result, these volumes paradoxically end up contributing to the process of canonizing individual photographers in a way that recalls the general surveys mentioned above. This so-called additive approach of entering more and different names into an already existing inventory has also been criticized for serving only to reinforce the normative powers of canons.9 The only difference is that they canonize women instead of men, while the histories of the broader majority of women photographers (that Williams calls for) and their imprint on society and culture remain untold.
“Why have there been no great women artists?” Linda Nochlin famously asked in 1971. To answer this question, she moved the focus from the individual level of achievement to the institutional—in other words to the social contexts of art production.10 Twenty-five years later, Rita Felski, in line with Nochlin, called for histories that pay
6 Val Williams, The Other Observers: Women Photographers in Britain, 1900 to the Present (London: Virago Press, 1986), 11–12.
7 Marie Robert, Ulrich Pohlman, and Thomas Galifot, Qui a peur des femmes photographes? (Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers?) (Paris: Hazan, 2015).
8 Emma Lewis, Photography – A Feminist History (London: Octopus, 2021); Luce Lebart and Marie Robert, eds., Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (Paris: Textuel, 2021); English edition: A World History of Women Photographers (London: Thames & Hudson, 2022).
9 Marsha Meskimmon, Transnational Feminisms and Art’s Transhemispheric Histories: Ecologies and Genealogies (London and New York: Routledge, 2023), 21.
10 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, eds. Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran (New York: Basic Books, 1971).
sufficient attention to the specificity of women’s lives and experiences. She argued for the necessity of addressing non-canonized and overlooked practices in order to contest and reformulate dominant historical narratives.11
In a photo-historical context, such attempts at bringing forth so-far-unknown or ignored women photographers, their practices, and the culture in which they worked have already started to surface. As early as 1986, for example, Barbara Hall and Jenni Mather published an encompassing presentation of hitherto unrecognized Australian women photographers, active between 1840 and 1960.12 More recently there has been a new surge of interest in recovering the stories of long-overlooked women photographers, such as Katherine Manthorne’s study from 2020 of women photographers in the US between 1850 and 1900; Šelda Puķīte and Indrek Grigor’s Silver Girls, an exhibition focusing on early women photographers from The Baltic States (also 2020); and Colleen Skidmore’s effort into highlighting the Canadian women who worked in photography between 1840 and 1940 (2022).13
Striving for Independence forms part of the ongoing, worldwide expansion in this field of research as it presents new studies on the lives and works of early women photographers from the Nordic countries. Our purpose is not to establish new canons, but rather to undertake a transnational feminist project of the kind that, to paraphrase Marsha Meskimmon, excavates histories and mine archives to materialize counter-narratives of the past that challenge contemporary gender norms.14 In addition to the works mentioned above, a major source of inspiration behind this volume has been the writings by feminist scholar Abigail Solomon-Godeau, whose way of looking at photography has consistently been conditioned by a feminist lens—and who has always met fellow photography scholars from the distant Northern Europe with kindness, appreciation, and encouragement. While she herself has largely addressed mid- and late twentieth-century Anglo-American photographers, she also points to the importance of acknowledging the specific and heterogenous instrumentality of photographic production.15 Such insights have obviously been relevant for our studies of mostly unknown or forgotten women photographers, whose work, in their own time, was considered neither art nor directed toward an art audience. In addition, Solomon-Godeau stresses
11 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
12 Barbara Hall and Jenni Mather, Australian Women Photographers 1840–1960 (Richmond, Victoria: Greenhouse, 1986).
13 Kathrine Manthorne, Women in the Dark: Female Photographers in the US, 1850–1900 (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2020); Šelda Puķīte and Indrek Grigor, Silver Girls: Retouched History of Photography (Tartu: Tartu Art Museum, 2020); Colleen Skidmore, Rare Merit: Women in Photography in Canada, 1840–1940 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2022).
14 Meskimmon, Transnational Feminisms, 8.
15 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography After Photography: Gender, Genre, History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 7.
the necessity of understanding any photograph in relation to its contextual framing by asking who is speaking, how, and why.16
Even if many of the women photographers whose stories are presented in this volume are forgotten today, they were well-known in their own time. It has therefore been essential for us to recall their individual histories; explore how they “spoke” through the images they produced; pay attention to what rhetorical and formal strategies they employed; as well as to the social, cultural, economic, and political contexts in which this image production took place. This includes asking who commissioned their work, and for what purpose. But in addition to researching the “work” these photographs did in their own time, we have also—informed by recent scholarship—considered how their photographs circulated across time and space, thus forming their own social trajectories and biographies.17
However, our foremost ambition with this volume is to demonstrate how women photographers held a particular strong position in the early photographic culture in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland between 1860 and 1920. At the turn of the century, around 40 percent of all registered photographers in Denmark were women, compared to 34 percent in Sweden and approximately 30 percent in Norway and Finland. In Iceland, women photographers made up about 15 percent of all working photographers in the second half of the nineteenth century.18 As we describe in this volume, women photographers in all these countries established their studios in the large cities and many small towns around the country or sought to make a living as itinerant photographers in the regions. Several of them owned their own studios, hired only women assistants, and remained unmarried; some also lived in lifelong relationships with women partners. Notably, a considerable number of these professional women not only engaged in aesthetic production, but also in political struggles. They engaged in the women’s rights movement and fought for the right to vote and to improve the conditions for women and children in society on a broader scale.
Many of their clients came from modest social backgrounds, and a visit to the photographer was not an everyday matter but represented some kind of personal investment. Being photographed was a serious enterprise, which made them enter the studio and place themselves in front of the camera with utmost respect for the situation and
16 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institution, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 182.
17 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Joan M. Schwartz, “Working Objects in Their Own Time: Photographs in Archives,” in The Handbook of Photography Studies, ed. Gil Pasternak (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), 513–529.
18 According to the Danish census for 1901; the Norwegian and Swedish censuses from 1900. The numbers for Iceland are drawn from Inga Lára Baldvinsdóttir’s book, Ljósmyndarar á Íslandi 1845–1945 (Reykjavik: Þjóðminjasafn Íslands, JPV, 2001), and from Finland, Hannu Sinisalo and Ritva Tähtinen, eds., Suomen valokuvaajat 1842–1920 (Helsinki: Finnish Museum of Photography (Suomen valokuvataiteen museo), 1996).
in anxious anticipation of the resulting image. But the women photographers also directed their cameras toward their local topographies and often became the first to record the highly cherished landscapes and landmarks photographically. The photographers we address in this volume thus differed considerably from the kind of upper-class, high-society amateurs that have already secured a place in the canonized histories of photography: women who photographed their daughters in ball gowns, their horses and dogs, their trips to Egypt, and so forth. What we propose, and will demonstrate in the following chapters, is that the early women photographers in the Nordic countries were, first and foremost, professionals who used the camera as an instrument to their personal, economic, and political independence.
Setting the Scene: A Transnational History of Photography
Why did so many Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Icelandic women choose to make a living as a photographer at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century? One answer would be that photography at the time still was a relatively new profession and not yet “gendered,” as such. It was not until well into the twentieth century—among other factors due to the development of specific genres, such as press photography —that the photographer was predominantly associated with a man. Another, and simpler, answer to this question would be that they did so because they finally could. According to a comparative historical study of the legislation in the Nordic countries,19 unmarried women and widows were given access to certain categories of craft and trade from the mid-1850s onward. This access, which in practice mostly impacted women from the bourgeoisie, was accompanied by legal regulations which also granted unmarried women and widows economic and legal independence. Some women had already become photographers by then. When, for example, the unmarried Nicoline Weywadt (1848–1921) started up as a photographer in Iceland in 1872, she was also the first woman ever in the country to run her own business (see the chapter on Nicoline Weywadt).
For married women the situation was different: they remained subject to the authority of their husbands until the final decades of the nineteenth century.20 They were not considered legal persons and, consequently, did not have the right to enter into agreements or make decisions concerning their own income or property. However, de-
19 Ida Blom and Anna Tranberg, eds., Nordisk lovoversikt. Viktige lover for kvinner ca. 1810–1980 (Oslo: Nordisk Ministerråd, 1985), 5–27.
20 There were of course variations within this broader picture: In both Finland and Sweden, married women remained under their husbands’ authority until the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, Swedish married women gained authority of their own incomes and property as early as 1874, which relates to the establishment of an association in 1873 who fought for this cause: Married Woman’s Property Rights Association (Föreningen för gift kvinnas äganderätt).
spite the way the jurisdiction and cultural norms in general seemed to be in favor of the idea that married women should stay at home and take care of the household and children, changes began to take place around the mid-1880s. Gradually, married women in all the Nordic countries also gained the right to enter working life and control their own income (even though Finnish women, due to the way the civil wars slowed down legal affairs, remained under their husbands’ rule until 1930). These important legal changes, which increasingly positioned women and men on equal terms, occurred due to economic and technological development.21 All this contributed to women gaining access to education and authority over their own finances.
Interestingly, later studies have shown how a considerable number of women took on a new role as independent business entrepreneurs as early as in the 1880s. The historian Eirinn Larsen has, for example, demonstrated how in Norway there were “pockets” in the liberal nineteenth-century economy that had not yet been subject to public regulation. Self-made women could, for instance, thrive in the hotel, café, and restaurant sectors. But they also had a strong presence in a variety of service enterprises, for example in hairdressing, beauty care, home baking, the transport and removal business—and, importantly, commercial photography.22
When the doors opened for women to become part of working life outside the home, photography was perceived as a lucrative possibility, and most of the women photographers presented in this volume embarked on careers as professional photographers after the mid-1880s. In 1925, the pioneering Norwegian photographer Thea Nielsen explained the advantages of photography as an occupation: She emphasized how the training period “was neither long nor thorny” as it only consisted of a one-year course undertaken at a professional photographer’s studio. But she also noted that it required “good taste, a sense of beauty, and some drawing capabilities.”23 As Nielsen saw it, photography should therefore be well-suited for women, who “should be conditioned to excel in professions where a taste for the decorative and swift precision is required.”24
Nordic women’s participation in productive life outside the home resulted in demand for more influence in the political arena. Many of the legal changes implemented throughout the nineteenth century were the result of the development and efforts of the organized women’s movement. Their opposition was directed toward marriage laws, property regulations, and the lack of opportunities for education—in other words, re-
21 Blom and Tranberg, Nordisk lovoversikt, 19.
22 Eirinn Larsen, “Kjønn og næringslivshisorie,” in Næringsliv og historie, eds. Espen Ekberg, Mikael Lönnborg and Christine Myrvang (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2014), 139–159.
23 Thea Nielsen, “Kvinder som fotografer” (Women as photographers), in Norske Kvinder. En oversigt over deres stilling og livsvilkaar i hundreaaret 1814–1914 (Norwegian women: A survey of their position and conditions in the century 1814–1914), vol. 1, eds. Marie Høeg and Fredrikke Mørck (Kristiania: Berg & Høeg’s forlag, 1925), 360.
24 Ibid, 361.
sources that were vital for participation in the bourgeois society they came from.25 In Denmark Dansk Kvindesamfund (Danish Women's Society) was founded as early as in 1871. Only two years later, in 1873, the Swedish organization, Föreningen för gift kvinnas äganderätt (Married Woman's Property Rights Association) was established. This organization later became part of the broader organization for women’s rights in Sweden, the Fredrika- Bremer-förbundet, established in 1884. In the other Nordic countries, bourgeois women’s organizations were established over the course of the 1880s. Many women photographers were active members of these organizations, where access to higher education and the right to vote were among the primary issues. In a speech delivered at a women’s meeting in 1901, for example, the Norwegian photographer and women’s rights activist Marie Høeg (see the chapter on Magdalene Norman) stated:
The right to vote is the means, the only means, that will provide the single individual opportunity to influence society, its laws, and regulations. All those who are unfortunate, or in some sense suffer under the ways in which society is organized, will, with the right to vote, have a means with which they, in their own right, can work against the disadvantages that they are affected by.26
As members of the organized women’s movement, women photographers contributed to the systematic work of influencing public opinion by writing newspaper articles, putting pressure on members of national assemblies, signing petitions, etc.27 Notably, women in the Nordic countries obtained the right to vote in parliamentary elections relatively early: Finland, as the first country in Europe, in 1906; followed by Norway in 1913; Iceland and Denmark in 1915; and Sweden in 1921. By comparison, women were not granted the right to vote in the United Kingdom until 1928, and in France, not until 1944. Moreover, this was a time when debates on women’s position and rights in society made its mark on the Nordic cultural arenas. During the first half of the nineteenth century, painting and drawing were, as noted by Anne-Maria Pennonen, merely regarded as suitable female hobbies. Women could not be submitted to art academies, and only a few worked as professional artists.28 Consequently, when, for example, a publicly funded art school for women run by Dansk Kvindesamfund opened in Copenhagen in
25 See Ann Ighe, “Manlige förmyndares medborgerliga rättigheter och skyldigheter. Något om genus som kvalifikation till offentligheten, omkring 1800–1850,” in Kvinnor på gränsen til medborgerskap. Genus, politik och offentlighet 1800–1950, eds. Christina Florin and Lars Kvarnström (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlas, 2011).
26 Marie Høeg, “Kvinderne og valget,” Gjengangeren, no. 143, December 3, 1901 Authors’ translation. Also available at: https://virksommeord.no/?t=6841
27 Blom and Tranberg, Nordisk lovoversikt, 20.
28 Anne-Maria Pennonen, “A New Research Project: ‘Pioneering Women Artists in the 19 th Century,’” FNG Research, May 31, 2021, https://research.fng.fi/2021/05/31/a-new-research-project-pioneering-womenartists-in-the-19 th-century/
1888, it only happened after an extensive public discussion about women’s right to study art.29
Equality for women was also a recurrent theme in nineteenth-century Nordic literature. In the mid-1850s, the Norwegian author Camilla Collett published her novel Amtmandens døtre, which deplored the lack of freedom suffered by women in bourgeoise marriages. But there were also other women authors in the other Nordic countries who, in the 1850s, addressed women’s conditions and limited possibilities, such as Mathilde Fibiger (in Clara Raphael, Tolv breve, 1851); Fredrika Bremer (Hertha, 1856); and Fredrika Runeberg (Fru Catharina Boije och hennes döttrar, 1858). It could also be claimed that the close connection between the women’s cause and literature is one of the most characteristic features of the so-called modern breakthrough in the 1870s and 1880s.
One example of this is Henrik Ibsen’s realist drama Et dukkehjem (A Doll’s House, 1879). where the playwright introduced a woman protagonist who demanded her own emancipation. Thus, he drastically intervened in the fin de siècle gender debates, not only in the Nordic countries, but also elsewhere in Europe. It has even been claimed that he, so to speak, invented the “new woman” in England, and that he was hailed as a hero of the British suffragette movement.30
Yet other, related controversial issues were also brought to the surface in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland in the 1880s. Not least among them was the question of equality between the sexes in relation to sexuality and public moral, which caused hefty debates among Nordic intellectuals, politicians, and women’s movement activists. This issue was first fronted by the Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who in 1883 published a play titled En Hanske (The Gauntlet). In the play, the protagonist, a young woman, throws her glove at her husband after discovering that he is sexually experienced and thereby “unclean.” The author thus exposed the sexual double standard, which ignored men’s sexual excesses provided they took place with discretion, while women encountered moral condemnation and contempt. This view was strongly opposed by members of the radical intellectual elite, such as the Danish literary scholar Georg Brandes, who maintained that neither women nor men should abstain from premarital sexual relations, but rather enjoy them on the same terms. The Swedish author August Strindberg, on the other hand, claimed that equal morality was not only impossible but also undesirable, as he considered men to have a stronger sexual drive than women—whose foremost role was to be wives and mothers.31
29 See: “Teaching for Women: 1870 s–1920 s,” Schools of Visual Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Art, Accessed September 2024, https://kunstakademiet.dk/en/schools-visual-arts/history-schools-visual-arts/ teaching-women-1870 s-1920 s
30 Sally Ledger, “Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress,” in The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, eds. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Berlin: Springer Link, 2002), 79–80.
31 For more information on this debate, see: Elias Bredsdorff, Den store nordiske krig om seksualmoralen: en dokumentarisk fremstilling af sædelighedsdebatten i nordisk litteratur i 1880erne (København: Gyldendal, 1973); Gro Hagemann, Feminisme og historieskriving (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2003).
However, the heart of the matter was the inherent double standard of prostitution, which also was one of the issues that the women’s movement rallied against.32 In Norway, they were supported by the Norwegian painter Christian Krohg, who critically addressed the situation for the prostituted women in the capital in a cycle of paintings and in his tragical novel Albertine (1886) . 33 The novel was confiscated by the police, but meanwhile, in Copenhagen, George Brandes characterized Krohg’s work as true art: a novel with “a heart.”34
All these events formed part of a legal, political, and cultural development that, between 1860 and 1920, more or less followed the same pattern in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland. In this period, the Nordic countries were all, as we have seen, marked by similar tensions and hard-won battles concerning women’s equal rights. We have therefore chosen to address the lives, production, and experiences of the Nordic women photographers in a trans-Nordic perspective. The transnational flow and cross-border exchanges that characterized the Nordic culture in which these photography pioneers operated simply defy the dominant national methodological approaches to Nordic histories of photography. In their time, even the borders were in flux: Finland had been part of Sweden for hundreds of years until 1809, when it became an autonomous part of the Russian Empire as the Grand Duchy of Finland. Although Finland gained its full independence from Russia in 1917, the country still had a relatively small Swedish-speaking population. Norway had been part of the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway for four hundred years until 1814 when it became an independent state, although it entered into a union with Sweden that lasted until 1905. Iceland, which like Norway had been subordinated under Danish rule, declared its independence in 1944.
The Nordic women photographers moved freely across the borders. Occasionally, Norwegian women traveled to Finland, Denmark, or Sweden to get their training or attend courses in professional studios; Finnish women traveled to Sweden; Icelandic women to Denmark; and some Swedish women to Norway. They exchanged technological know-how, aesthetic ideals, professional and sometimes also political ideas, formed friendships, and corresponded frequently. The following chapters in this volume, which address the life and work of nineteen Nordic photographers, are therefore not presented according to the photographers’ respective national identities. We have instead focused on how they, each in their own way, connect to some common thematic clusters with relevance to our overall proposal: that photography worked as a means for gaining personal, economic, and political independence for the women who placed themselves behind, rather than in front of, the camera. But basically, our transnational approach to the histories of the early Nordic women photographers takes the form of storytelling
32 Agnete Strøm, “Bevegelsene i den europeiske prostitusjonspolitikken,” Materialisten, 4 (2014).
33 Oscar Thue, Christian Krohg (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1997).
34 Bredsdorff, Den store nordiske krig, 181.
(or storying), which, as a form of critical fabulation as Meskimmon poignantly puts it, may hold the potential to “know differently and articulate otherwise, as part of a transformative, affective politics.”35 We have chosen one particular woman, one individual “story,” as the main focus of each chapter. At the same time, each chapter—introduced briefly below and organized into thematic sections—ties the particular career path and life story to larger societal patterns and developments, as well as to other women photographers of the time.
Stepping Out of the Shadows
In the words of Lena Johannesson, the camera worked as what she terms “a woman’s emancipatory apron” in the early photographic culture in Europe.36 Nevertheless, in the historiography of this culture, many women have become “invisible” due to their roles as assistants or co-workers in male photographers’ studios, or as sisters, daughters, or wives in family businesses.37 The ambition of the first section of this volume, “Stepping Out of the Shadows,” is to address how some women photographers, for different reasons and with varying degrees of agency, escaped this invisibility—and, in doing so, assumed new kinds of femininity in the public sphere.
The question of how women could define themselves as something other than wives and mothers was also frequently debated by activist women in the Nordic countries, who envisioned the emergence of a “new woman” by the turn of the century.38 The term itself was coined in the fin-de-siècle American and British feminist press, but soon found its way into the mainstream press, where its meaning changed.39 The new woman was a figure associated with the woman’s movement, education, and professional careers. But it also connoted a liberated lifestyle which included traveling, driving cars, smoking cigarettes, cutting one’s hair short, and wearing rational outfits rather than constraining corsets and long skirts.40 The new woman could, dependent on ideological position, be
35 Meskimmon, Transnational Feminisms, 50.
36 Johannesson, “Photo Exile,” 17.
37 For a discussion of such invisibilities, see Sigrid Lien, “‘Last Seen Alone on the Prairie’: Migration, Photography, and the Invisibility of Women,” in Photography, History, Difference, ed. Tanya Sheenan (Hanover, NH: Darthmouth College Press, 2014).
38 Lise Busk-Jensen, “‘Den nye kvinde’ i det tidlige 1900-tals kulturdebat og litteratur,” Fund og forskning i det kongelige biblioteks samlinger 55 (2016): 213–255, https://doi.org/10.7146/fof.v55i0.118915.
39 Tallia Schaffer, “‘Nothing but Foolscap and Ink’: Inventing the New Woman,” in The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, eds. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 40.
40 See for example Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, eds., The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s Through the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Lena Wånggren, Gender, Technology and the New Woman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
seen as either a figure of liberty or as a threat to society.41 In Denmark for example, the new woman became subject to ridicule in the press as early as 1895.42 The term has since been used in academic literature to characterize the new type of women who made her mark on society at the time. However, in this literature, the new woman is, by some scholars, characterized as a transitional figure who was socialized into the intimate sphere of femininity and motherhood, but still made her way into a male-dominated world.43
The women whose stories are presented in this first section all stepped out of the shadows of traditional femininity as photographers, where they worked hard to balance their life between the public and private sphere. Catherine af Hällström presents the Swedish-born photographer Amalia Euphrosyne Chiewitz-Magnuson (1819–1899), who established a career in Turku, Finland, in 1865, even though the training she had received at home had been directed toward marriage and family life. She was unmarried then, which, as we have seen, was a prerequisite for a woman to start a business at the time. Not only was she among the first women photographers in Finland, but she also became the woman photographer with probably the longest engagement to be married. After she and her future husband, Elias Magnuson, got engaged in 1845, they waited as long as twenty-five years to marry. While her family could not supply a dowry, it was paradoxically her successful career as a photographer that made it possible for her to raise the money and finally get married in 1870.
For others such as Kirstine Lund (1852–1948), portrayed by Mette Sandbye in this book, photography became a means of survival when marriage could no longer offer economic security. Lund entered the photography business after her husband’s bankruptcy and subsequent emigration to the US left her as a single parent with responsibility for three young daughters. Sandbye describes how Lund’s business quickly prospered, and how she, always alert to new opportunities, managed to position herself favorably in response to the ongoing processes of modernization in the region where she worked in Denmark—while at the same time being able to raise her daughters as liberated and independent women.
Also, for Hulda Szacinska (1845–1922), authored by Sigrid Lien, becoming a widow involved stepping out of the shadows. After her husband, the renowned court photographer Ludwik Szacinski, committed suicide in 1894, she was left with full responsibility of their studio in the Norwegian capital that they had run together since they got married in 1872. Trained as a photographer, she continued to raise the standards of the studio
41 Tone Hellesund and Inger Marie Okkenhaug, “Innledning,” in Erobring og overskridelse: de nye kvinnene inntar verden 1870–1940, eds. Tone Hellesund and Inger Marie Okkenhaug (Bergen: Unipub forlag, 2003).
42 Unknown author, “Unge Piger i Amerika” (Young Girls in America), Lolland-Falsters Stifts-Tidende, September 12, 1895.
43 Hellesund and Okkenhaug, “Innledning,” 2.
