Mary Willumsen

Mary Willumsen came from a working-class family in the Copenhagen district of Valby. While young, she learnt the meaning of hard work. As a seven-year-old, she helped her mother and brother to deliver newspapers, earning a little more for the family. After she was confirmed in 1899, she worked as a seamstress at the Magasin du Nord department store. In 1910, she married Harald Axel Larsen, a house painter and photographer who died in 1913.

From the beginning of the 20th century, Danish photographers started to show interest in sports and bathing facilities where they could photograph women in flimsy clothing. Helgoland, a popular bathing establishment on the outskirts of Copenhagen, attracted a number of photographers including Peter Elfelt, Holger Damgaard, Julius Aagaard and Sophus Juncker-Jensen. In 1914, Mary Willumsen also started to visit the establishment.

In 1919, the Copenhagen police began to investigate all the city's kiosks to see if they were dealing in erotic photographs. As a result, in 1920 they arrested Mary Willumsen for overstepping the law. More than 1,000 of her postcards were seized from the Scala Kiosk in just one month and a total of 15,000 were confiscated as evidence. A further 10,000 were stopped on their way to Germany, showing the scale of the operation. The investigation became known as the "Aga Case" as it involved postcards sold through the mail order company "Aga Foto". The courts finally determined that the postcards were in fact legal and returned most of them, dropping the charges. Nevertheless, as a result of the police investigation, Willumsen immediately stopped producing postcards.

Mary Willumsen never returned to photography. Instead she made a living from buying antiques and selling them to well-to-do customers in Hellerup and Gentofte.

Mary Willumsen occupies a special place in the history of photography. Some of her photographs are admittedly rather conventional examples of "daring" shots of women in spicy positions. But in others, she reproduces informal situations at the bathing establishment. The women's curves stand out against the plain geometry of the surrounding woodwork or we see the wave-like rhythm of women lying on the surrounding sand dunes. Even if Willumsen's postcards were sold at the Scala kiosk to those looking for pornography, the Helgoland bathing establishment seems to have offered a level of openness where women could act naturally without behaving erotically. The resulting photographs show that freedom of expression is more important than eroticism.