Long before queer visibility had a name, two women in rural Norway staged a quiet revolution—armed with a camera, a fake mustache, and a fierce sense of play.
Berg & Høeg, “Water scene”. Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg in a rowing boat in the studio, 1894-1903. Collection of Preus Museum
In a box marked “Private,” tucked away in a barn in the small Norwegian town of Horten, lay a radical archive that would rewrite parts of queer photographic history. The photographs—over 400 glass plate negatives—were discovered in the 1980s, long after their creators, Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg, had passed into relative obscurity. What they revealed was a hidden performance of identity, resistance, and joy, captured quietly during Norway’s staid and patriarchal fin de siècle.
At first glance, Berg & Høeg’s studio work appears perfectly ordinary. From 1895 to 1903, the two women produced formal portraits, landscapes, and postcards for the local community, many of them from Horten’s naval base. Their studio was one of many dotting provincial Europe, producing images designed to document, not disrupt. But in those private negatives—never meant for public eyes—they constructed an alternate reality: one where gender was fluid, power was playful, and expression was liberation.
Marie Høeg is the central figure in most of these images. We see her dressed in men’s suits, top hats, and false mustaches, gazing assertively into the camera. In one frame, she smokes a cigarette; in another, she leans confidently, legs spread, while Bolette, behind the lens, captures her with a conspiratorial intimacy. There are photographs of group performances, theatrical tableaux, and spontaneous moments of joy. These were not casual larks—they were subversions, playful rehearsals for a life not yet possible.
Their relationship was as layered as their work. While no official record affirms the romantic dimension between Marie and Bolette, the intimacy in the photographs speaks volumes. They lived together, worked together, published together. After closing their studio in Horten, the pair moved to Kristiania (modern-day Oslo), where they founded a publishing house, Berg og Høghs Kunstforlag A.S., producing postcards and books, most notably Norske Kvinder (Norwegian Women), a three-volume series documenting the achievements of Norwegian women in politics, art, and education. It was one of the earliest efforts to archive feminist history in the country.
Marie was also a suffragette, and Horten’s first feminist agitator. She co-founded the Horten Discussion Association—a daringly political forum for women—and the Horten Women’s Council. Yet, while her public activism was significant, it’s in the private performances captured by Bolette’s camera that her defiance finds its most radical expression.
These photographs collapse the distance between public and private, performance and protest. They are not simply early examples of queer visibility; they are reminders that the urge to self-fashion, to experiment with gender and presence, has always existed—even in the most repressive environments. What’s astonishing is not just their content, but their preservation: an archive of resistance hidden in plain sight for nearly a century.
In the age of Instagram and self-branding, Høeg and Berg’s images resonate with new urgency. Their work sidesteps the contemporary impulse toward performative vulnerability; instead, it is full of delight, curiosity, and an insistence on being seen—on their own terms. There is no irony here, only courage.
Today, their images are housed in Norway’s Preus Museum and have been exhibited internationally. They have become talismans for queer artists, feminists, and anyone who has ever felt the friction between how they are seen and how they see themselves. They are a reminder that photography can be both a mirror and a weapon, a tool of the state and an instrument of rebellion.
Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg didn’t just document their lives; they staged them, audaciously, with a clarity of purpose far ahead of their time. What they left behind is more than a series of photographs—it is an argument for freedom. Not the kind won in courts or on ballots, but the quieter kind: the freedom to be absurd, tender, powerful, and completely oneself, even if only for the eye of a friend and a lens.
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