In the forests of Dalarna, Sweden, among stumps and second-growth timber, stand Scotch pines several centuries old. Into their bark, between the seventeenth and the early twentieth century, young women carved dates, initials, and messages to one another. They were shepherds, many of them teenagers, who left their villages each summer to work together on the fäbod — the summer farm — and take their families’ cattle to pasture. Elina Birkehag went into the woods with a camera and found these trees, photographing the marks the shepherds left behind.
D for Daughter, published by Spector Books in 2023, gathers that work across 304 pages, with 45 black-and-white and 112 colour illustrations. Birkehag serves as photographer and editor, working with co-editor Laslo Strong, who also designed the volume; critical and contextual essays come from Amelia Groom and M. Ty, Quinn Latimer, Meg Miller, Jungmyung Lee, Matilda Kenttä and Linnea Rutz, and Jennie Tiderman Österberg. The inscriptions, as the publisher frames them, amount to a coded language and a plain assertion of presence: here we draw our names.
What distinguishes the book is the way it treats the tree as a carried archive — not illustration but a surface that has held adolescent handwriting for generations. Birkehag’s practice centres on inscriptions in relation to the body, technology, and time, and this subject sits exactly at that intersection. Sequencing and design carry the argument: bark marks, portraits of place, essays in conversation, a book that lets a reader learn to read the trunks. The concerns it raises — who gets to leave a mark, whose labour is recorded, how a forest becomes a document — give it reach beyond its specific region and period.
The book was shortlisted for the Swedish Photobook Prize in 2024. Its English-language softcover format brings the photographs together with several writers’ perspectives on the inscriptions. Collectors drawn to artist’s books that treat photography as a form of retrieval, and that recover histories of women’s work with real formal intelligence, will find the book’s combination of subject, scholarship, and design unusually complete. It is a quiet, exacting volume, and one that rewards returning to.
