North by Northwest

Norwegian and American landscape photography are the subjects of a new exhibit at the National Nordic Museum.

A unique new exhibition that will explore the similarities and differences of American and Norwegian landscape photography is now open at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. Charles Leander Weed (1824-1903), Yo-Semite [stet] Valley from Mariposa Trail, California, 1865, albumen print. Ron Perisho Collection. Courtesy National Nordic Museum.

Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography—which draws from the collections of Norway’s Norsk Folkemuseum, University of Bergen Libraries, and the holdings of private collector Ron Perisho—examines late 19th-century and early 20th-century photography of Norway and the American West side by side. The exhibition will feature works by Scandinavian photographers Anders Beer Wilse, Axel Lindahl, Knud Knudsen and Marcus Selmer, and American photographers Carleton Watkins, A.J. Russell, Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, among others. Most of the photographers worked in the 19th and 20th centuries. Andrew J. Russell (1829-1902), Hanging Rock, Floor of Echo Canyon, Utah, 1868, albumen print. Ron Perisho Collection. Courtesy National Nordic Museum.

Axel Lindahl (1841-1906), The Voss Railway, Between Trendereid and Vaksdal, 1885-88, albumen print. Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, Oslo. Courtesy National Nordic Museum.“The exhibition investigates the artists’ attempts through personal initiative or as part of government surveys to photograph a national landscape in relation to diverse political, economic, and cultural interests. The viewer is asked to take a deeper look at both the similarities and the differences of the photographers’ attempt to build a national identity based on the notion of wilderness being conquered by new technology,” the museum notes. “Additional programming will take visitors through the exhibition from the Indigenous viewpoint of these regions, considering the impact of the expansion of infrastructure, extraction of mineral resources and Indigenous dispossession.”