This paper examines how Swedish Americans used photography and the backdrop of the West to construct their own sense of identity, empower themselves as colonialists, as well as the significance of the photographic image in their transition from Swede to American.
Nordiska Museum’s collection “Amerikaminnen foto A-L and M-Ö” offers a record of photographs sent along with letters from Swedish-American immigrants to their friends and families back home in Sweden. The Amerikaminnen (translated: Mementos of America) collection, housed in at the museum archives in Stockholm, provides us with more than simple records of people and places. A closer look at the photographs originating specifically in the American West offers an opportunity to discuss themes of place and identity.
While many of the images sent home to Sweden from North America in the 19th century could be simply categorized as professional studio portraits, we also see a significant proportion of environmental portraits and landscapes. This paper looks specifically at these environmental portraits and photographs taken outside of the formal photographic studio as they offer expanded opportunities for analysis of other identifying factors, such as location, background, composition and symbolism. While the collection includes images from across North America, this paper concentrates on images originating from the western Midwest and American West in the 19th and very early 20th centuries. By focusing on the frontier experience, this paper addresses the Swedish immigrant’s relationship to the land and how it shaped their identity as well as how the land was shaped by its new inhabitants.
In an early form of social media (letter writing/correspondence) Swedish Americans used photographs to construct their identities as adventurers, conquerors and inhabitants of the American West. The visual language used by Swedish-Americans is not unlike contemporary forms of identity-building present in social media forms such as Facebook and Instagram. The relationship between personal identity and place that are pervasive in the Amerikaminnen images are also present in both contemporary discussions surrounding immigration and environmental ethics.
Specifically of interest in this context are the questions: What can we learn from the way in which early Swedish-American settlers pictured themselves in the West? What does it say about them as transitioning immigrants? What attitudes are reflected towards the land itself? How did they empower themselves as colonialists through the use of photography.
By using photography to help form their perceptions of themselves the settlers also influenced how they, as individuals, would be perceived by friends and relatives back home, which perpetuated the myth of The Wild West, helped romanticize the American Frontier and further empowered new Americans as actors of Manifest Destiny.
2014.