The Zickerman collection
Lilli Zickerman, initiator of the Swedish Society of Crafts and Design, travelled around the Swedish countryside between 1910 and 1932 to inventory Swedish vernacular textiles. A large number of textile items were photographed using a large format camera.
Lilli Zickerman
The Zickerman Collection at Konstfack consists of 12,000 images in 133 boxes, ordered according to technique, which each contain some hundred partly coloured photographs of textiles from all over the country. The original collection can be found at the Nordiska Museet, and consists of 24,000 photographic plates and hand-coloured paper plates. A selection of the latter was copied to be used as a study collection accessible to the public. The study collection was donated to the National Association of Swedish Handicraft Societies in the 1940's and has since then been deposited at Konstfack, where it has provided knowledge of a rich, Swedish vernacular textile tradition. All of the images have been carefully catalogued and labelled with data on technique, material, measurements and thread count in the warp, as well as the name, address, province, county and parish of its owner.
The collection is located one floor down in the library and is accessible to the public.
The Zickerman Collection online
The Zickerman collection has been digitized by Hemslöjden (The National Association of Swedish Handicraft Societies) and is available online.
The Zickerman Collection (Hemslöjden)
Video (in Swedish) about the collection: