Iceland review - 2014, Qupperneq 16

14 ICELAND REVIEW
A young woman fixes her hair while
gazing directly at you through the
mirror that frames her beautiful face.
A boy with elvis hair plays his guitar with
passion. A woman has her hair cut at home,
with a child timidly looking on. These cap-
tivating black and white domestic scenes,
shot in the 1950s by lilý Tryggvadóttir, are
among the highlights of a new exhibition
at the national Museum and the reykjavík
Museum of photography featuring selected
works of 34 female professional photo
graphers spanning 140 years. “lilý’s series,
featuring friends and family at home, is
among my favorites. And remarkably the
photographs are now put on display for the
very first time,” says photographer katrín
elvarsdóttir, the exhibition’s curator.
The exhibition is the result of a two year
research period in which katrín explored
the archives of every museum in iceland
that agreed to take part. “My goal was to
get an idea of the extent of women’s con-
tribution to icelandic photography. But
i was also looking for a common thread
running through this long period of time.
What i discovered, to my surprise, was an
enormous amount of photography related
to domestic life. Scenes from ordinary fam-
ily life captured within the privacy of the
By ÁSta andréSdóttir
PHoTogRAPHS coURTESy oF
tHE national MuSEuM of icEland
AnD tHE rEykjavik MuSEuM of PHotoGraPHy
home, containing a kind of intimacy that is hardly ever
seen in the works of their male counterparts. it is as if the
people in the photos were more willing to let down their
guard with a woman behind the camera.”
in light of her findings, katrín divided the exhibition
into three categories: landscape & nature (displayed
at the reykjavík Museum of photography), family/
domestic life and portraits/daily life (on display at the
national Museum of iceland). “once i had found these
three themes, i focused on selecting works that fitted
into them, from an aesthetic perspective. This is not a
conclusive retrospective; i’m not an art historian.”
At the exhibition, photographs from different eras, but
featuring the same composition and subject matter, pro-
vide a clever link between different times. near a recent
photo of a young man reading from a laptop computer
is another photo of a young man reading a book, only
a century earlier. Above a contemporary photographic
series of a baby in its cradle during the first months of its
life, hangs a photograph taken in 1915 featuring a simi-
lar looking cradle. “i was constantly searching for these
repetitions—these connections. i wanted to connect
our times to the beginning of photography in iceland,
although not in an obvious way.”
The first professional female photographer was
nicoline Weywadt, who opened a studio in djúpivogur,
east iceland, in 1872. Back then, photography was
a brand new trade in iceland and only women from
rich families were able to study it abroad—usually in
denmark—before opening their own studio. “But once
A FeMinine FocuS
In addition to landscape and portraits, family and domestic life have always been
a prominent subject matter of Icelandic female photographers.