In the 1980s, archivists cataloguing the estate of Bolette Berg (1872–1944) and Marie Høeg (1866–1949) opened a suitcase labelled “private” in a barn behind the couple’s house near Oslo. Inside were hundreds of images made after the working day at their commercial photography studio had ended: a private archive of experiments in how gender could be worn.

The collection, presented by The Public Domain Review out of the Preus Museum, is a set of deliberate inversions:

  • Høeg poses counting stacks of banknotes in a neckerchief, hand on a military dagger, hooded in the furs of an arctic explorer, or deadpan as a young boy with a cigarette
  • Berg mostly stayed behind the camera; the more conventional portraits in the pair’s commercial output are the ones that paid the bills
  • Friends and family joined in — Høeg and her brother Karl cross-dress in one ensemble, and the teachers Ingeborg Berg, Julie Antonsen and Trine Ulriksen play cards and drink while Høeg smirks at the lens and uncorks another bottle
  • Høeg appears, as the scholar Sølvi Bennett Moen notes, more conventionally feminine playing a plainly fictitious man, and more conventionally masculine playing a woman

The archive reads as a send-up of middle-class respectability as much as a private sexual record. Emma Lewis, in Photography: A Feminist History, describes the images as precisely that kind of class parody.

The couple were not only playing. They ran a successful studio in the naval port of Horten before moving the business to Kristiania (Oslo) and expanding into postcards, magazines and art reproductions. Høeg had trained in Finland, where the women’s rights movement had won universal suffrage in 1906; in Norway she founded a branch of the National Association for Women’s Right to Vote and used the studio as a salon for the issues of the day.

The chronology is the point. Norwegian women won the vote in 1913. Homosexuality was not decriminalised in Norway for another sixty years. The photographs were made in the gap between those two dates — kept in a suitcase, and not meant for the tourists and travellers who bought the studio’s respectable work. The full selection is viewable at The Public Domain Review. Text by Hunter Dukes.