![]() Høeg, who was from a family of fishermen, grew up in the small town of Langesund, and began photographing after traveling with her brother to Finland. Though much of Berg and Høeg’s lives remain a mystery, a handful of academics and curators have slowly pieced together some details from newspaper clippings and other documents of the era. “It’s almost like a wedding photo, so I’m very fond of that.” “Both of them have their hands visible, and you can see there’s a ring on each of their fingers,” Aasbo noted. It’s one of the only known photographs of the couple posing together. One of Aasbo’s favorite images features the couple in their prop boat, with Høeg ‘rowing’ its oars. Now art historians are course-correcting the short life of Elizabeth Siddal She was a ‘supermodel’ of the Pre-Raphaelite period. But since the first exhibition of Berg and Høeg’s work was shown in the mid-1990s, the women have become cult figures in queer art history, and continue to gain wider international acclaim - most recently through the exhibition “ Like a Whirlwind” at the major international festival PhotoESPAÑA, on view until August 24 in Madrid. ![]() In another, Høeg and one of Berg’s sisters light cigarettes while sitting in a rowboat a small dog peeking over the edge.īought at auction in the 1970s by the photographer Leif Preus, these personal negatives went unnoticed within his larger collection for years. In one, Berg dons an oversized fur-lined wool coat, a mustache and spectacles, eyes glimmering with mischief. In the photos, Berg and Høeg dress up in womenswear and menswear, using props and painted backdrops to set their irreverent scenes. Preus Museum-Norwegian Museum of Photography Little is known about Berg, and she has received less attention than Høeg, though they were lifelong creative, business and romantic partners. But decades after their deaths in the 1940s, another radical aspect of their lives resurfaced, tucked away in boxes of glass negatives marked “private”: the couple eschewing traditional gender norms in playful portraits they took of themselves and loved ones.īolette Berg pictured with a handlebar mustache. After hours, though, it became a clandestine gathering space for politically-minded women, as equality movements were burning brightly around the country.īerg and Høeg lived life on their own terms, both as romantic partners in a time of little LGBTQ visibility and as business partners running a studio and publishing company when women were highly restricted in their careers - and beyond. During the day, it operated as a conventional atelier where locals in the coastal town of Horten, Norway, could come have their portraits taken for pocket-sized cartes de visite, the era’s tradeable profile pictures. ![]() Editor’s Note: Untold Art History investigates lesser-known stories in art, spotlighting unsung and pioneering artists you should know, as well as uncovering new insights into influential artworks that radically shift our understanding of them.Īt the turn of the 20th century, the studio run by Norwegian photographers Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg had a secret second purpose.
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