NORDIC MOMENTS

Nordic Moments showcases one of the Nordic region’s largest collections of historical photography. Through a changing display of images, the exhibition offers personal and cultural perspectives on life in the Nordic countries.

Spotlight on the Photo Collections

The Nordiska Museet holds around six million photographs – an extraordinary collection documenting life, work, housing, traditions and everyday moments across Sweden and the Nordic region, from the mid-19th century to today. These images are a unique resource for understanding how people have lived, shaped, and shared their environments through time.

Until now, only a small fraction of the archive has been shown – inside or outside the museum.

Nordic Moments is presented across seven rooms. Here, themes, photographers, formats and eras shift and evolve in a series of temporary exhibitions, beginning on 17 October 2025.

Our first main theme Metamorphoses, invites you on a dreamlike journey through memory, time and chemical transformation. We present images whose negatives have been carefully preserved through our major digitisation initiative. These photographs are shown alongside highlights from the collections and works by noted photographers such as K W Gullers, Sten Didrik Bellander and Hélène Edlund.

Metamorphoses presents a selection of photographs that have undergone a visual transformation – shaped by memory, time and chemical reactions.

When around 100,000 photo negatives were damaged by water, a major rescue effort was launched to preserve, restore and digitise them. But in the process, something unexpected happened: new images began to emerge. The natural decay of the materials – along with chemical changes – added unexpected layers to the photographs, giving them a haunting, dreamlike quality.

Cracks, rips, holes and haze now ripple across the images. Some motifs seem to have melted or blurred, partly hidden behind abstract forms. Others have been distorted into something unrecognisable. None of these effects were deliberately created by human hands – yet many resemble works of art.

These transformed images can feel like portals into emotional landscapes – into memory, into dreamlike worlds, or into places we can no longer return to.

In Metamorphoses, comedian and author Zinat Pirzadeh reflects on the photographs and the memories, places and inner worlds they evoke in her. On display from 17 October–May 2026.