Bolette Berg (1872-1944) and Marie Hoeg (1866-1949) were lovers and Norwegian photographers. They were involved in commercial photography, shooting portraits and landscapes in their own studio, and later owned a printing press where they printed art publications. They were also part of the first wave of the struggle for gender equality in Norway, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (M. Hoeg founded the Norwegian branch of the National Association for Women's Suffrage). But what they are most famous for is a collection of about sixty negatives found among their legacy in the 1980s. These are their "secret," private photographs, taken between 1895 and 1903, in which they experimented with the representation of gender identities. The photographs show the authors, their relatives, and female friends in clothing of both sexes.

Marie Høeg with a moustache, 1895–1903.

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At a time when well-to-do, bourgeois women did not have a profession but were, according to T. Veblen, merely a symbol of their husbands' status, these photographers developed an independent practice, treating clothing itself as an exemplary symbol or a symbol of symbolization itself (perhaps similar to Thomas Carlyle's understanding presented in his novel Sartor Resartus from 1834). Obviously aware that clothing items do not represent a mere outer shell but a basic human habitus, B. Berg and M. Hoeg, by exchanging clothes between sexes, questioned the rigid fashion and thus gender divisions of their time.

However, from that time until today, clothing as such has almost gone out of fashion: new microtrends are still being launched every season (and materials are technologically improved), but these changes are so fast and arbitrary that fashion has ceased to function as a semantic system and is therefore no longer able to represent a reliable indicator of social stratification. Also, in the West to which we belong, clothing is no longer, as it once was (at the time these photographs were taken), a reflection of class, race, ethnicity, religion, age, economic position... and often not even professional affiliation. At best, it is treated as a marker of personal, psychological, almost incommunicable idiosyncrasy (the loss of communicability or the disappearance of fashion, conditionally speaking, has led to a greater, not lesser, valuation of clothing, as shown by the attention our culture pays to individual styling, introducing a special profession of stylist).

However, one forced, patriarchal line of demarcation stubbornly persists. Namely, during the 20th century, the so-called women's clothing gradually absorbed the so-called men's clothing, which is why contemporary women can now experiment with all aesthetic codes without being obliged to prove anything to the gender police in the form of public opinion. The reverse is not true—cisgender, heterosexual men are still obliged to submit to gender and sexual aesthetic orthodoxy; their obviously fragile masculinity demands confirmation in the strict and visually poor aesthetic of "male" appearance, uncontaminated by "humiliating" gender ambiguity. And thanks to susceptibility to such cultural inertia, or to the conscious cultivation of such racial—pardon, gender—purity, misogynistic worldviews are preserved in their latent, implicit form, playing into the hands of today’s neoconservative politics.

And precisely in our time of rising influence of the global right and renewed insistence on gender and sexual synonymity, this exhibition represents an inspiration and a symptom of irreconcilability for all those who fight against (gender) stereotypes, prejudices, anthropological reductionism, and political repression of all autocratic regimes. The photographs thus exhibited show cross-dressing, which here is not a matter of deception and hiding the biological sex but of the de-essentialization of gender. The overcoming of the imposed and easily readable gender identity is done in the name of multiple identities—self-creations of gender-interchangeable but recognizable, flexible amalgams of the imaginary and the real. At the same time, it should be noted that the authors and other people in the photographs do not step into the (para)theatrical domain but remain within the confines of their own everyday life. Unlike, say, contemporary drag disguise, there is no spectacle in these photographs: the dressing up of the photographed subjects in the clothes of the "opposite" sex seems more decent and appropriate, in accordance with the bourgeois decorum of that time. Thus their transgression, transgender dressing, seems unusually "usual" or (pseudo)normative.

Since contemporary society has not yet reached such a degree of (aesthetic) equality, these private photographs of a gendered retrofuturistic mood remind us that modern women and men still need to prove themselves equal to a challenge from the past—by making this practice public.

Karl Heg, M. Høeg’s brother, dressed in women’s clothing, 1895–1903.

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Text author and exhibition curator Dušica Popović

Exhibition design Damjan Dobrila

Support: Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway, European House, The Preus Museum