Solveig Lund

Solveig Lund was born in 1868 in Oslo (then Christiania), the youngest of six children. She trained as a photographer in Copenhagen under Jens Petersen and in 1892, opened her own studio in Moss, just south of the capital. By the turn of the century, Solveig had established herself in Oslo where she worked until 1906.

Solveig’s art emphasised the bucolic and the natural world with many of her photographs portraying personifications of the seasons, months of the year and European countries – giving her work an almost mystical feel. She was known to capture scenes of pastoral life outside, but frequently used her studio to construct highly stylised, elaborate tableaux. Her largest body of work was a series of portraits of young women and girls in national dress or bunad, often intricately hand painted. The mountainous Hardangerfjord landscape served as a recurring motif in her work as did the Sámi from the north of Norway.

Solveig’s photography studio catered to middle-class Norwegians and in fact, many of the women appearing in her photos dressed as Sámi were not actually part of the indigenous group themselves, but rather metropolitan Norwegian women wearing Sámi outfits as costumes. This was at a time where the national assimilation project of the Sámi by Norway was at its height and many of these romanticised photographs would later be turned into colonial postcards, which, although very popular at the time, have come to be regarded as problematic by Sámi and postcolonial scholars alike.

After her studio closed when she was 38, Solveig continued to hand colour her photographs and postcards. By 1910, she was sharing a house with six other unmarried women among whom were committed feminists Ida Wedel Jarlsberg and Valentine Dannevig. At a time when many women struggled to become even photographic assistants, let alone run their own studio, Solveig led a remarkably independent life. Today, much of her work can be found at the Norwegian Folkmuseum (Norsk Folkemuseum) and is available digitally at Digitalt Museum.

By Katya Lee Browne