Portraits from the first 100 years of photography
With the Winter Olympics in full swing, I thought it might be fun to share this carte-de-visite portrait of a young man holding a pair of ice skates in Uppsala, Sweden. Nineteenth-century images of people dressed specifically for winter sports are relatively rare. Because of the limitations of early cameras and photographic processes, such portraits... Continue Reading →
This photograph was taken in southeastern Sweden. The photographer, G.M. Svendsen, was based in the town of Tingsryd. The photo was for sale on eBay in North Carolina. I wish I knew how it ended up there! The railway in the photo is the Nättraby-Alnaryd-Elmeboda Järnväg (järnväg = railway). The NAEJ (or NAÄJ) was... Continue Reading →
The young man in this carte-de-visite portrait is wearing a military-style tunic with an "F" on the collar. The photograph was taken at the studio of Fredrique Holmstedt in Vadstena, Sweden. I had difficulty finding information online about Fredrique. Unable to read the handwritten dedication in Swedish in the upper left corner, I turned to... Continue Reading →
This late cabinet card (1900-1915) came to me from Finland. The only information on it is a stamp on the front with the name Ellen Björklund: I haven't found any information about Ellen Björklund online, or even another photo by her, which is surprising. I wondered if her studio might have been in Sweden,... Continue Reading →
When I saw this cabinet card for sale recently, the men in the photo were unidentified, but two elements immediately appealed to me: the wintry studio scene and the older man's kindly smile. (I thought the man on the right might be his son, but that turned out not to be the case.) After receiving... Continue Reading →
This postcard was sent from Helsinki (Swedish: Helsingfors), the capital of Finland, to the Finnish port town of Hanko (Hangö) on February 16, 1915. At that time Finland was a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire. Because Russia was engaged in the First World War, the card had to be cleared by a wartime government... Continue Reading →
When I saw the carte-de-visite above, I wondered if it was a real scene or an elaborate joke. Could they really have sailed on ice? It turns out they could have! The sport is called ice yachting, and that's all I know about it. The guys to the left of the boat are skating and... Continue Reading →
This carte-de-visite isn't the first wedding photograph on the blog, but it's the first portrait of a bride and groom without attendants. For some reason I've been slow to appreciate wedding portraits as a genre, so I haven't bought many over the years. I found this one in January while doing research for an earlier... Continue Reading →
It was relatively rare for women in Britain and North America to set up their own commercial studios in the nineteenth century. In Scandinavia, in contrast, women seem to have embraced the business of photography from the earliest days and to have enjoyed commercial success on a par with their male counterparts. This topic has... Continue Reading →
This carte-de-visite was made by Jacob Lundbergh (1828-1904) in Stockholm. According to his Swedish Wikipedia page, he worked as a professional photographer for eleven years (1861-1872), becoming famous for his portraits of actors, singers and other cultural figures. His brother, Bernhard Lundbergh, was an opera singer with the Royal Theater.
Tokens of Companionship 
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