Sigríður Geirsdóttir Zoëga ( – ) was an Icelandic photographer. She was one of the most prominent photographers in Iceland in the first half of the 20th century.
Early life and education
Sigríður Zoëga was born on in
Reykjavík
Reykjavík is the Capital city, capital and largest city in Iceland. It is located in southwestern Iceland on the southern shore of Faxaflói, the Faxaflói Bay. With a latitude of 64°08′ N, the city is List of northernmost items, the worl ...
, the daughter of linguist and educator
Geir T. Zoëga
Geir Tómasson Zoëga (G. T. Zoëga), born 1857, died 1928, was an Icelandic linguist, known for writing several English-to-Icelandic and Icelandic-to-English dictionaries, as well as a dictionary on Old Icelandic, largely corresponding to Old Nor ...
. She and her sister Guðrún trained under photographer
Pétur Brynjólfsson.
Career
In 1910, she left Iceland for
Copenhagen
Copenhagen ( ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a population of 1.4 million in the Urban area of Copenhagen, urban area. The city is situated on the islands of Zealand and Amager, separated from Malmö, Sweden, by the ...
, where she worked in the studio of
Nora Lindstrøm, then went to Germany to work for
Otto Kelch. Her experience was mostly with studio work like retouching and she had limited experience with actually taking pictures until she became an assistant to German photographer
August Sander
August Sander (17 November 1876 – 20 April 1964) was a German portrait photography, portrait and Documentary photography, documentary photographer. His first book ''Face of our Time'' (German: ''Antlitz der Zeit'') was published in 1929. Sande ...
.
After three years with Sander, Zoëga retumed to Iceland in April 1914 to open a photography studio in Reykjavík with financial help from her family. The next year, a fire destroyed her studio, but she and her friend
Steinunn Thorsteinsson bought
Brynjólfsson's studio and opened a new studio, Sigr. Zoëga & Co.
Zoëga's photographic work was primarily portraiture, and her style was a relaxed and natural one favored by the rising bourgeois class in a growing Reykjavík, in contrast to stiff
carte-de-visite
The ''carte de visite'' (, English: ' visiting card', abbr. 'CdV', pl. ''cartes de visite'') was a format of small photograph which was patented in Paris by photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in 1854, although first used by Louis Dod ...
-style portraits of previous generations. She closed her studio in 1955 and donated her photographic plates, numbering in the thousands, to the
National Museum of Iceland
The National Museum of Iceland ( Icelandic: ''Þjóðminjasafn Íslands'' ) was established on 24 February 1863, with Jón Árnason the first curator of the Icelandic collection, previously kept in Danish museums.
Collections
The second curat ...
.
She was one of the founders of the
Icelandic Photographers' Society
Icelandic refers to anything of, from, or related to Iceland and may refer to:
*Icelandic people
*Icelandic language
*Icelandic orthography
*Icelandic cuisine
See also
* Icelander (disambiguation)
* Icelandic Airlines, a predecessor of Icelandai ...
in 1926 and the
Listvinafélagið (Friends of the Arts Society) in 1916.
Personal life
Zoëga had a daughter with painter
Jón Stefánsson. They did not marry and Zoëga raised her daughter on her own.
References
External links
*
National Museum of Iceland
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zoëga, Sigríður
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1889 births
1968 deaths
Icelandic photographers
People from Reykjavík
20th-century women photographers
20th-century photographers