I
735
ICELAND
Photography was one of the very few technical innova-
tions which the people of Iceland were able to adopt in
the 19th century. The country was a Danish colony, its
social structure undeveloped, and its population sparse:
in 1840 there were only 57,000 inhabitants in an island
with an area of 103,000 square kilometres. Daguerre’s
method became universally known in 1839, and just a
few years later this technology was brought to Iceland
by Icelanders who had learned it in Scandinavia and
also by foreign travellers, especially the French and the
British, who visited Iceland on research expeditions or
pleasure trips.
The oldest photographs of Iceland which have been
preserved are two daguerreotypes taken by the French
mineralogist Alfred Des Cloiseaux (1817–1897) in
Reykjavík in 1845. The early stages of photography in
Iceland were rather protracted. Three things in particular
account for the length of time it took for photography to
put down roots there. Most of the inhabitants lived very
simple lives; the country was in its very fi rst stages of
urbanisation; and the art of portraiture had not become
established among the people even though there were
a few local artists who had studied at the Academy of
Art in Copenhagen.
Photography in Iceland, therefore, differs from pho-
tography in other places in Europe because it fell to the
lot of photography to create a tradition of portraiture
and so it was in fact the precursor of the painted picture.
From 1845 until after 1860, a few people tried their hand
at photography but they practised it only for a short time.
Two of them took photographs using the daguerreotype,
but none of their images have survived. Customers were
slow in coming forward, technical diffi culties took their
toll on production and photographers had to depend for
their photographic materials on the infrequent arrivals
of ships from abroad.The turning-point occurred when the photographer
Sigfús Eymundsson (1837–1809) started working in
the country’s burgeoning capital city, Reykjavík, in- He became the fi rst photographer in Iceland to
succeed in making a living at photography, although he
was engaged in many other activities over the course
of time. He pioneered various innovations in photog-
raphy, such as the multiple reproduction of portraits of
prominent Icelanders, imitations of sterescopes featur-
ing identical photographs side by side but without the
three-dimensional effect and, starting in 1874, he took
the fi rst scenic photographs in large format, which he
sold to foreign visitors. A considerable selection of
original photographs by Sigfús has been preserved, and
his collection of plates is in the Þjóðminjasafn Íslands
(the National Museum of Iceland).
As urban areas developed and the population density
increased, so did the number of photographers, and as
soon as villages such as Djúpivogur, Ísafjörður and
Akureyri had the capacity to support them, they acquired
their own photographers. Among them was Nicoline
Weywadt (1848–1921), the fi rst woman photographer,
who did her training in Copenhagen, Denmark (as
did the majority of Icelandic photographers up until
- and who began working in 1872 in Djúpivogur
in Eastern Iceland. In the year 1890 there were 10 pho-
tographers working in eight places and by 1900 this had
increased to 23 in 16 places.
As the number of photographers grew, basic training
in the subject was shifted to Iceland, but most photog-
raphers still got their advanced training in Denmark as
before. Photography was closely related to handicrafts
and trade and those who worked at it were generally
working in other branches of the craft industry, or as
tradesmen, or were the daughters of shop managers
or civil servants. Their product was principally por-
trait photographs. As settlements were far-fl ung, the
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