Commissioned Double Portrait

Axel Mörner and Anette Strandberg, both from Stockholm, Sweden, were married in the chapel of the Drottningholm Royal Palace on December 8, 2000. Mikael Askergren was delighted to receive the commission to photograph gallery owner Axel Mörner and his bride for their wedding advertisement.

All Swedish newlyweds place a wedding ad in one of, or both of Stockholm’s two daily morning newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, several pages are filled with wedding ads. Swedish wedding ads are always illustrated with a photograph: a wedding ceremony snapshot or the like.

Mikael Askergren’s double portrait is not the kind of image one would expect to find in a Swedish wedding ad. The double portrait was of course inspired by the famous sequence in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), in which the two faces of the confused nurse (Bibi Andersson) and the neurotic patient (Liv Ullmann) are for a moment fused together, to become one flesh...

The illustrated wedding advertisement appeared in Stockholm’s two important morning newspapers on March 24, 2001 (Dagens Nyheter), and on March 25, 2001 (Svenska Dagbladet).