Photographers of Nineteenth-Century Gothenburg: Studios, Portraits and a Changing City

A city entering the photographic age

During the nineteenth century, Gothenburg was transformed by shipping, trade and industrial growth. Factories attracted workers, while the port became a point of departure for emigrants bound for America. The city's photographs belong to this wider history: studio portraits recorded individuals and families, while views of streets, canals and buildings fixed a changing urban landscape in images. Göteborgs stadsmuseum's permanent exhibition on nineteenth-century Gothenburg places trade, migration and industry at the centre of that transformation.¹

Photography had reached Gothenburg by the middle decades of the century. The city's museum collections include daguerreotypes, images formed directly on silvered plates without a reproducible negative. These early objects were unique photographs, rather than copies made from a negative.² Later portrait cards and glass-negative photography brought a different scale of photographic production.

Aron Jonason and the commercial portrait studio

Aron Jonason (1838–1914) stands among the defining figures of Gothenburg's nineteenth-century photography. After studying photographic practice in Copenhagen and German cities in 1864, he established a business whose changing addresses trace the geography of commercial photography in the city. The Göteborgs stadsmuseum catalogue records the partnership A. & P. Jonason at Drottninggatan 58 in 1865–70, A. Jonason & Co. at Södra Hamngatan 29 in 1879–88, and subsequent premises at Kungsgatan and Södra Hamngatan.³

Jonason was more than a studio portraitist. He also photographed city views, worked in journalism and became known for his humour and association with the royal court. His career illustrates how the photographer could operate simultaneously as craftsman, entrepreneur and observer of public life.⁴

The printed studio name and address on a surviving portrait mount are therefore more than decorative details: they are evidence of the city's commercial geography. The succession of premises also reminds us that a photographic firm's name could outlive a particular studio location.

Axel Lindahl and the photographed city

Urban photography extended beyond the portrait room. In May 1873 Axel Lindahl advertised a new photographic atelier near Nya Teatern. A view of Gustaf Adolfs Torg and the Östra Hamngatan canal from that year is attributed to him in a historical survey published by Göteborgs-Posten. The image preserves a waterfront urban environment that later generations would know in altered form: the canal section between Gustaf Adolfs Torg and Lilla Bommen was filled in during 1936.⁵

Such images record more than architecture. They show what the photographer selected as representative of the city, and what later rebuilding removed from everyday sight. Gothenburg's historical photographs are thus documents of urban memory as well as examples of photographic commerce.

The studio as a network of people and addresses

Not every surviving nineteenth-century portrait carries a famous name. Museum documentation of Axel Larson, for example, connects photographic activity with Öfra Husargatan 1, Skolgatan 2 and Viktoriagatan 11, and records family members working as photographic assistants. The surviving descriptions point to a business world of partnerships, assistants, successive owners and premises.⁶

This wider network matters. The history of photography in Gothenburg is not simply the biography of one celebrated photographer, but a record of how a new visual trade became embedded in the city's streets and households. The specialist bibliography Göteborgs fotografer: ateljéer och yrkesmän 1840–1910 by LarsOlof Lööf, held by Göteborgs stadsmuseum, documents the breadth of that photographic community.⁷

What the surviving photographs preserve

A portrait may preserve clothing, posture and a studio's carefully constructed setting; a street view may preserve commercial signs, transport, waterways and the architecture of an expanding port. Read together, these different photographs give Gothenburg's nineteenth century a human and geographical scale. The city's museum has explored that potential through its photographic history exhibition Inzoomat, drawing on photographs from the 1850s onward.⁸

The historical importance of these images lies not only in their subjects but also in the circumstances of their making: who operated the studio, where it stood, and how photographs circulated between families and across borders. Those questions connect the private portrait to the public history of the city.