Henry Goodwin was an Anglophile from his early years, and obviously his family was pro-English too. Bavaria had more or less been forced into the German union around 1870 and Preussia, which was the leading military force at the time, was unpopular with the Bavarians. Goodwin seems to have visited England as a teenager. There are photographs taken in Polling in 1899, and in an article from 1913 he tells the reader how he during the years before and after 1900 came to admire the gum-print method at photographic exhibitions as a means to reproduce large portraits.

In 1910, he and his wife, Ida, spent several summer weeks in Theberton, Suffolk. In London Goodwin contacted the president of the distinguished Viking Club in order to give a lecture or to write an article in Viking Club´s year-book, The Saga Book.

In the autumn of 1911 Goodwin was engaged to give a series of lectures at University College of London. The vice-president of the Viking Club, W. Paton Ker, had helped him to get in contact with professors of German and English at University College. The titles of the lectures were: "The Viking Age and its Influences on the English Language", "The Scandinavian Languages and their Characteristics", and "Loanwords in English". He also gave a lecture before the Viking Club as mentioned in the Saga Book of 1912: "November 17th, 1911. Dr. H. Buergel Goodwin, Ph. D., gave a lecture on 'Scandinavian Races and Nationalities' illustrated by coloured lantern slides."

As a photographer, Goodwin was still active on an amateurish level. He is mentioned as a member of Upsala Fotografiförening in 1907 and he participated in the exhibition, Fotografiska Upsala-utställningen, that year, and was rewarded a prize "For particularly artistic portraits". He also received a positive notice in Fotografisk Tidskrift: "The only artistic pictures were dr. Buergel Goodwin´s technically interesting carbro print portraits of linguists in Uppsala".

In the autumn of 1909 Goodwin became a member of Fotografiska Föreningen in Stockholm and he is introduced by an article and six pictures in Fotografisk Tidskrift, titled: "The Amateur Photographer as a Portraitist".

In 1910, when Goodwin and his wife stayed at Theberton, he contacted the seventy year old vicar, Rev. James Isaacson, who was also, according to Goodwin, an eminent photographer. In 1912 Goodwin published an article on James Isaacson in a series of articles, 'Colleagues Round the World'.

Next year the Goodwins were back at Theberton, where he was preparing himself for a series of lectures he was going to give in London in October 1911. One day they visited Thorpe with their host family to go for a bathe in the sea. Goodwin took some pictures of the beautiful maid, Olive Passmore, when she got out of the water, and made the first pictures in a series called "Wet Hair". He continued the series nine years later with two Swedish girls, Alva and Karin Bergström.

In 1912 Goodwin´s photographic career started. He marketed himself by writing a large number of articles on photographic subjects in the years of 1912-1915. He treated technical problems as well as general subjects. He published travel letters from England and other European countries. He preferred, like he used to say: 'the English way of photography and the English way of life'. He introduced in Scandinavia famous photographers, mainly British, as 'Colleagues Round the World', names like Bertram Park, Nicola Perscheid, James Isaacson, Theodor Hilsdorf, William F. Brigham, George Bernard Shaw, Otto Wegener, Herbert Lambert, Emil Otto Hoppé, and Clarence H. White.

In 1914 at the annual meeting of Svenska Fotografernas Förbund, (The Swedish Photographers´Association), Goodwin made an important statement before the members and introduced the demand for 'pictorial' pictures contrary to 'reproductional'. The purpose of his speech was to collect a representative selection of pictures to the 'London Salon of Photography'. The year before Goodwin had contacted the editor of the 'Photograms of the Year', Mr. F. J. Mortimer, and had settled with him that Goodwin should try to arrange a collection of pictures from the Scandinavian countries for the Salon. From 1914 to 1921 and in the years 1923 and 1929 Goodwin wrote the reports for the 'Photograms' on the state of pictorial photography in Scandinavia. In the 1915 report he declares:

'Progress we have certainly made...Here in the European North, as anywhere else, men who do self-contained artistic work - in one word creators - are "but few and far between".'

In the summer of 1914 Henry and Ida Goodwin spent part of their vacation at the 'Food-Reform Guest House" in Penlee, south of Dartmoor in Devonshire. He was requested by the hostess to take pictures for a new series of picture postcards. It has not been able to establish whether such postcards ever were produced.

Mainly due to Henry Goodwin´s efforts, the exhibition halls in London were opened to Scandinavian photographers in 1915-16. He knew many of the members of the Royal Photographic Society, and became a member himself in 1920. One of his friends, whom he used to contact when he visited London, was Herbert Lambert from Bath.

Here are the exhibitions abroad in which Goodwin participated during the years of World War I and after:

Year 1915

Exhibition at The Amateur Photographer´s 'Little Gallery' in London.

Year 1916

Exhibition at 'London Salon of Photography' in the Galleries of the Water Colour Society.

Year 1917

One-man show at The Amateur Photographer´s 'Little Gallery' in London.

Year 1918

One-man show at 'B.T.Centralen' in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Year 1921

One-man shows in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Year 1922

One-man show in London, invited by the the Royal Photographic Society.

Year 1926

Exhibition at 'The Oslo Camera Club International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography', Norway.

Year 1930

One-man show in Rome, Italy.

In January 1921 Henry and Ida Goodwin went to New York, invited by Condé Nast, publisher of the Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines, which had published pictures by Goodwin since 1915. Condé Nast made his home at Park Avenue available for the famous "Dr. Goodwin of Sweden" to use it for his studio work. Eastman Kodak provided a well-furnished laboratory at Long Island for Goodwin with an experienced assistant and equipment to suit Goodwin´s working methods. Henry and Ida Goodwin stayed in New York for three months. He took a lot of portraits, he began a series of exhibitions, starting at the Brown-Robertson Galleries at Madison Avenue, continuing to Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.

In June 1921 Goodwin published an extensive article about the English author May Sinclair in the Swedish journal Idun. He had met with her before the War. "Our tea-conversation lacked the necessary qualifications for degenerating into an interview. The conversation turned on questions of portraiture and art, about London- and Stockholm-models, and about artists and authors. About people. Not about books."

In October 1921 Henry Goodwin published another article in the series "Colleagues Around the World", this time about the distinguished English photographer, Herbert Lambert. Goodwin had known Lambert since 1913 and he used to visit him and his wife Edith in Bath when he visited London. In the article about Lambert, Goodwin quotes the American photographer Pirie McDonald:

"...'Make whatever tricks you want, make your pictures as beautiful as you can - you can make them to be liked by ten thousand juries. If the photography is intended for the model´s mother, and the mother does not want to clasp it to her breast, then it is of no value. We may wonder what their mothers did with the pictures of Daphne, Nancy and Madeleine. Lambert leaves us in no doubt about it."

In April 1922 Goodwin was invited by the the Royal Photographic Society to exhibit his America-collection at the R.P.S. galleries at Russell Square in London. He also gave three lectures in London: 'Naked versus Nude', before the R.P.S. 'Pictorial Group', 'Portraiture Pure and Simple', at the R.P.S. April meeting and 'Photographic Portraiture versus Artistic Bluff' at a meeting with The Anglo-Swedish Society. The lecture before the Society was originally labelled: 'Ordinary Orthodox Portraiture versus The Damnable Heresy of the Duhrkoopties'. The target of his attack was the German pictorialist photographer, Rudolf Dührkoop, who had died five years before, and his daughter Minya Diez-Dührkoop.

Goodwin´s exhibition was, according to the newspaper reviews, a great success, and The Graphic dedicated a full page to Goodwin and published four of his camera pictures. The Graphic also payed a great deal of attention to Goodwin´s crusade towards the artificial and the sensation-seeking development of photography:

"Dr. Goodwin's attitude was clearly brought out in lectures before the Society, in which he attacked the tendency on the part of photographers to go outside the proper limits of art, and translate photography into theatrography, and he threw much ridicule on fantastic lighting and other methods of faking."

Pictures on this page (in turn)
Click on the links to get full size views

'No title' - England c. 1911; 'Girl with Wet Hair' - Olive Passmore 1911; 'Flicka med vått hår' - 'Girl with Wet Hair', Karin Bergström 1920; 'Einar Nerman' - Swedish artist, c. 1915; 'Vilande sylfid' - 'Resting Sylphid', dancer Jenny Hasselquist, c. 1913; 'Madeleine' - Herbert Lambert, Bath, c. 1920; 'Systrarna Bergsten' - The Bergsten Sisters, 1919.