Tonye Boe Birkeland as Tuva Tenger, riding a camel in Mongolia.
Tonye Bo Birkeland
The imagined female scientists, explorers and adventurers depicted in Tognje Bo Birkeland’s photographs are echoes from the footnotes of women’s history. In her ongoing series, characterPhotographers dress as Victorian and early 20th century pioneers, dress in period costumes, carry binoculars and bellows cameras, and capture widescreen landscapes of mountains, fjords and drifting ice. Each photograph is a performance.
The project began in 2008, when Birkeland was taking a course on the role of photography in shaping historical truth: “Did Neil Armstrong go to the Moon? Was Roald Amundsen actually the first to reach the South Pole?” she recalls. “And then I decided I wanted to do something about women.” The first character she drew was a glaciologist.
Her photographs are like puzzles; her works are based on the names, appearances and biographies of real, unknown women. Louise Arner BoydBirkeland was a polar scientist who traversed the northeast coast of Greenland in the 1920s. In addition to stepping into the shoes of her creations, Birkeland wrote their diaries and created installations of their travel cases (filled with maps and geological samples), which she photographs and exhibits. She has immortalized her intrepid alter-ego in locations ranging from the snowdrifts of Svalbard to the hills of Bhutan.
www.newscientist.com
