Featured on PDR in the collection The “Private” Photographs of Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg (ca. 1895–1903)

In the 1980s, as archivists were cataloguing the estate of Bolette Berg (1872–1944) and Marie Høeg (1866–1949), they found a suitcase labeled “private” and proceeded to crack it open. Inside this cache — stored in a barn off the back of the couple’s home near Oslo, which they had purchased after years of running a commercial photography studio — were hundreds of images, taken after the working day had finished. Each, in its own way, offers a dazzling and irreverent vision of feminism and sexuality, challenging the norms that reigned in Norway at the turn of the century.