Mary Steen

Mary Steen (1889)

Maria Dorthea Frederikke "Mary" Steen (born October 28, 1856 in Hvilsager , † April 7, 1939 in Copenhagen ) was a Danish photographer and feminist . She was the first woman to work as a court photographer .

biography

Education and private matters

Mary Steen was born as the daughter of the teacher Niels Jensen Steen and his wife Caroline Kirstine. Petersen was born into a large family in a village between Aarhus and Randers on Jutland . The father taught the children himself. Later she went to Copenhagen and attended a trade school for women there, which had been set up by the Danish Women's Association ( Danish Dansk Kvindesamfund ). However, she found that her office work was not fun and that she preferred to be creative. She trained as a photographer in Sweden and then in Denmark. In Copenhagen she was in a relationship with a married man and gave birth to their daughter Aurelia in 1879, who she presumably gave up for adoption . She later lived with a Norwegian photographer and from 1924 until her death with the painter Olga Vilhelmine Meisner-Jensen.

Career as a photographer

In 1884, Mary Steen opened her own photo studio on Amiagrav in Copenhagen. The photographs she took in the Fleron family home in Copenhagen are among the first to show people in their homes. For these pictures she received a silver medal at the Nordic Industrial, Agricultural and Art Exhibition in 1888 . At the world exhibition in Chicago in 1893, she exhibited photos with similar motifs.

In 1888, Steen became the first female court photographer in history. First, she portrayed the royal family of Denmark, but from 1895 also members and relatives of the British royal family at Windsor Castle . The wife of the heir to the throne Albert Edward , Princess Alexandra , a daughter of the Danish King Christian IX. , had got her the job. Photos of the Russian tsarist couple she took alone were ordered by the thousands from a Parisian bookseller. This work gave Mary Steen a good reputation and many customers, including wealthy from higher circles.

In 1918 Mary Steen had to give up her business due to increasing hearing loss and sold it to the actor Robert Schyberg . Because of the economic crises, she suffered from a lack of money in the years to come, as her pension had lost value. However, she was financially supported by her partner Olga.

Commitment to women

In 1891, Steen was also the first woman to join the board of Dansk Fotografisk Forening (Danish Society for Photography) ; Besides her, seven other women were initially members. She called for better working conditions for the photographers 'assistants, such as eight days' annual vacation and half a day off on Sundays. She implemented this herself in her studio, for example by paying her staff well and all employees receiving the same salary. She also encouraged women to take up the profession of photographer. She also made sure that girls from her family received a good education.

Mary Steen was involved in the women's movement and was active in the Danish Women's Association (Dansk Kvindesamfund) , where she sat on the board from 1889 to 1892. Together with her colleague Julie Laurberg , she photographed the most prominent representatives of the Danish women's movement. In 1891 she received a grant of from Niels Lunde Reiersen donated Reiersenske Fund , which allowed her her first foreign trip to Germany and Austria to make.

• 

  Queen Victoria and her daughter Beatrice

• 

  The Moltke couple

• 

  Viggo Stuckenberg

• 

  Marie Luplau

• 

  Hanka Schjelderup

Web links

Commons : Mary Steen  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Mary Steen (1856-1939), Photographer. In: National Portrait Gallery. December 26, 2016, accessed January 23, 2017 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Mary Steen. In: Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon. Retrieved January 23, 2017 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Remembering Mary Steen, Denmark's first female court photographer ~ Photography News. In: photography-news.com. October 28, 2016, accessed January 23, 2017 . 
3. ↑ Joanna Cohan Scherer: A Danish Photographer of Idaho Indians. University of Oklahoma Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-806-13684-4 , p. 132 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).