In Sweden, everyone knows the place Älvdalen. That is not immediately obvious, as it is a remote town some 350 kilometresnorth-west of Stockholm, surrounded by mountains and forests. The reason for its notoriety dates back to 1667. In that year, a boy from the village accused Gertrud, a twelve-year-old girl, of witchcraft. He claimed he had seen her walking on water.
The boy’s testimony marked the beginning of a period of witch hunts. Over the course of eight years, more than 300 death sentences were carried out, with twelve-year-old Gertrud as the first victim. Today, this period is regarded as a dark chapter in Swedish history.
Before becoming a photographer, Maja Daniels (Sweden, 1985) studied sociology — not to answer grand questions, but to question the status quo. What she calls History with a capital H: the narrative accepted as indisputable truth. Like her previous book Elf Dalia(2019), Gertrud is set in Älvdalen, the place her family hails from.
Älvdalen became synonymous with the witch hunts. Opposing that stigma, Daniels presents a different image — a story of resistance. How has the local language survived for centuries while the local economy depends on trade with outsiders? Historians and linguists do not know. According to Daniels, Älvdalish is more than a language. It is a way of seeing the world, a form of resistance from the periphery against the centre of power.
In Gertrud, Daniels once again enters into dialogue with the glass negatives from the archive of Tenn Lars Persson (1878–1938), a local amateur photographer, scientist and inventor with an interest in magic. Persson’s early experimental photography not only offered a glimpse into daily life but also produced uncanny images. In one photograph, two men are suspended in mid-air; in another, two women sit on a crescent moon.
When Persson was photographing, the occult — such as belief in witchcraft — and science were not yet strictly separate worlds. By combining Persson’s images with her own colour work and partly returning to the early twentieth century, Daniels makes it possible to question the status quo once again. ‘Myths are open to interpretation,’ Daniels says. ‘Photographs are too. The essence of what is visible is often invisible and lies in unspoken associations.’ A myth can therefore be altered by adding new images to it. That is precisely what Daniels does.
The photographs in the series Gertrud invite association. Like Persson’s work, Daniels’ images range across the spectrum from the everyday — we see residents at home, with their families or by the lake — to the occult and the supernatural. The latter is not only present in her choice of subjects, but is also emphasised through long exposure times, resulting in visible light trails. She also allowed light leaks, which sometimes create an orange glow in the photographs. As a result, the images do not reveal themselves immediately. To read them, one must make an effort and form one’s own view.
