1368
Severin Nilson was his opposite, using his camera to
document the poor and urban slum areas.
August Strindberg tried photography during a few
intensive periods. A journey through the French coun-
tryside aimed to create a social documentation in a new
way, but his disregard for established techniques made
the material unusable. Another project to photograph
clouds failed for similar reasons. But the existing body
of around 60 pictures consists mainly of strong portraits
and auto portraits.
Several of Sweden’s best photographers have been
immigrants. To a greater extent, a number of Swedish
photographers have produced their most important work
in other countries. The most famous was Oscar Gustav
Rejlander, who studied painting in Rome before mov-
ing to England. His “art photography” attracted a wide
audience in the 1850s.
Otto Wegener, from the south of Sweden, opened
in 1883 an elegant studio in Place de la Madeleine in
Paris, competing with Nadar the Younger and Reutlin-
ger. He signed his works simply by using his Christian
name Otto. His period of fame lasted until the end of
the century but the body of his work seems lost. Hence,
he is overlooked by photo historians, except for a few
footnotes in connection with his apprentice Edward
Steichen.
John A. Anderson photographed lumberjacks and
railroad workers in California, Eric Hägg documented
the Gold Rush in the Klondike and Gustaf Nordenskiöld
explored the ancient rock dwellings in Meza Verde,
Colorado.
The Swedish tourist Association was formed in 1885
as a part of a nationalist movement. To help Swedes
discover their own country, photographers were invited
to portray landscape, wildlife an people in their home
regions. A generation of versatile professionals found
a reason to get out of the studios and deliver coherent
portfolios of cities and countryside.
The signals of pictorialism were rapidly registered in
the 1890s. Amateur Gunnar Malmberg and the profes-
sional Herman Hamnqvist were the fi rst to introduce
the gum bichromate process. The pictorialist era was
dominated by photographers as Ferdinand Flodin, John
Hetzberg and Henry B. Goodwin, but their main oeuvre
was created after the turn of the century.
Pär Rittsel
See also: Wegener, Otto.
Further Reading
Söderberg, Rolf, and Pär Rittsel, Den svenska fotografi ns his-
toria, Bonnier Fakta, Stockholm 1983. (History of Swedish
Photography, in Swedish with an English summary Sidwall,
Åke & Leif Wigh, Bäckströms Bilder. Prints from the Helmer
Bäckström Collection in Fotografi ska Museet, Museum of
Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden 1980.
Jacobson, Anderson, John, Claes-Håkan, Rosebud Sioux: A
Lakota People in Transition , C-H Jacobson produktion,
Sweden 2004.
(Ericson, August William) Palmquist, Peter E, Fine California
Views: The Photographs of A.W. Ericson, Eureka, California
1975.
Hägg, Eric A, The Alaska Gold Rush 1897–1901. Photographs
by E. A. Hegg, International Center of Photography, New
York 1976.
Jones, Rejlander, Oscar Gustav, and Edgar Yoxall, Father of Art
Photography.
O.G. Rejlander 1813–1875, Newton Abbot: David & Charles,
1973.
Rejlander, Oscar Gustav) Spencer, Stephanie, O.G. Rejlander
Photography as Art, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1981.SWITZERLAND
The fi rst announcement of Daguerre’s discovery ap-
peared in the Schweizerischer Beobachter on the 19th
January 1839 and the fi rst specimens of the new process
were shown in St-Gallen and Zurich as early as October
of the same year. In 1840, the French itinerant photogra-
pher named Compar was touring the country, followed
by many others introducing the daguerreotype to an
interested public and teaching its technique.
Even though the physicist and professor of veteri-
nary surgery at the University of Bern Andreas Gerber
(1797–1872) claimed in February 1839 to have been
able to fi x microscopic prints on silver chloride paper
as early as 1836, one of the most important pioneers
of early Swiss photography remains Johann Baptist
Isenring (1796–1860), a landscape painter and engraver
from St-Gallen. He succeeded in obtaining excellent
portrait daguerreotypes already in November 1839. And
in August 1840 he showed in his fi rst photographic art
exhibition ever examples of his art in St-Gallen, and later
in Zurich. As an itinerant photographer, he worked and
traveled with a “sun-wagon” in Switzerland, Southern
Germany, and Austria.
During the 1840s, daguerreotype studios appeared
in many cities. Beginning in 1841 the sculptor Antonio
Rossi (1823–1898) ran a Kabinett in Locarno.
The optician and precision mechanic Friedrich
Gysi (1796–1861) in Aarau added another branch to
his business by producing daguerreotypes from 1843
onward, while in 1847 another optician, Emil Wick
(1816–1894), decided to change profession and became
the fi rst daguerreotypist in Basle. Franziska Möllinger
(1817–1880) began taking daguerreotypes views of
main cities and landscapes around 1844. She published
15 of them as an edition of lithographs but only one
original daguerreotype by this fi rst Swiss woman pho-
tographer has come down to us. The lithographer Carl
Durheim (1810–1890) in Bern produces daguerreotypes
since 1845.
In the French-speaking part of Switzerland the dif-
fusion of the new medium happened differently. Sev-