Pictures of Longing

Available now from the University of Minnesota Press

JUST OUT: A BEAUTIFUL AND TIMELY BOOK ABOUT IMMIGRATION

Haunting and revealing photographs sent home by Norwegian immigrants in America as visual document and collective expression of the emigrant experience.

Sigrid Lien brings more than 250 America–photographs into focus as a moving account of Norwegian migration in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, conceived of and crafted by its photographer-authors to shape and reshape their story. Reading these photographs alongside letters from Norwegian immigrants, Lien provides the first comprehensive account of this collective photographic practice involving “the voice of the many.”

 
 As the translator of this book, I'm very pleased to see Sigrid Lien's research into Norwegian immigration via the photographs taken by new arrivals to the Midwest and Plains states made available in this country. The photographs are amusing, touching, and always illuminating, and the book also sheds light on a time when Scandinavian immigrants were not invariably welcomed with open arms, but seen, like the Germans and Irish and Poles, as threats to the social order.


This exhaustively researched book, written in a highly readable style, presents a gold-mine of material for anyone interested in Scandinavian-American history, immigrant history, history of the Midwest, Norwegian history, and the history of American photography. Developments in photographic technology and distribution at the turn of the last century made it possible for the great wave of Norwegians arriving in the United States at that time to keep up contact with their homeland and present detailed records of their encounter with a new country. This excellent study brings these people and the experience of immigration to life.

— Linda Haverty Rugg, University of California, Berkeley