The exhibition tells the story of the first professional female photographers from Denmark, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. It is the first time that the work of ten selected women photographers is presented in a joint Nordic exhibition. The women worked as independent photographers during different periods from 1872 until 1925, within the Kingdom of Denmark, as it then was. The exhibition displays the range across which these first female photographers operated – both staged and documentary, aesthetically and technically.

The exhibition shows that the women were trendsetters in early Danish, Icelandic and Faroese fine art photography and it reveals that they operated under widely differing commercial and practical circumstances, not only in their home countries, but also in America and the Danish West Indies.

The exhibition’s title is a reference to female photographers quite literally working in the shadow, that is behind the camera. But female photographers also often stood in the shadow of their male colleagues, with some even working under their husband’s name. Many of them have therefore disappeared from history. With this exhibition, the first female photographers finally emerge from the shadows as a group and take up their rightful place in national photographic history.