Marie Høeg and Ingeborg Berg in a rowing boat, ca. 1895–1903.
For many years, Berg and Høeg ran a successful studio in the naval port of Horten, selling photographs to tourists and travelers, before moving the business to Oslo (then Kristiania) and expanding their remit, publishing postcards, magazines, and reproductions of fine art. When not posing or photographing, they organized on behalf of women. Høeg had completed her photographic training in Finland, where she was influenced by the Finnish women’s rights movement — which won universal suffrage for women in 1906. In Norway, she established a branch of the National Association for Women’s Right to Vote and used her and Berg’s studio as a salon to discuss the issues facing women at the time. Norwegian women would win the universal right to vote in 1913; homosexuality would not be decriminalized in Norway for another sixty years.
