“City Faces – visual culture and social structure in Stockholm, 1880–1930” is a project that links historical photographic portraits with historical-biographical data in ways that are breaking new ground in several fields of research. The aim is to create new opportunities to access, enrich, study and pedagogically explain visual culture and social structures during a period of intensive urbanisation. In this project, Stockholm’s City Museum and City Archives are collaborating with researchers from Stockholm University and Uppsala University. The project is expected to run for five years. It is administered by the City Museum and is headed by the museum’s research director, Rebecka Lennartsson. The principal researcher is Mats Hayen, research manager at the Stockholm City Archives. One important element of the project is the development of digital face recognition technology for historical photographs – a task headed by Professor Anders Hast, Uppsala University.
–Mats Hayen is a historian and research manager at the Stockholm City Archives. He appears regularly as an expert on television, radio, newspapers and podcasts. The recipient of the 2015 Yngve Larsson Prize from the Swedish Institute for Urban History at Stockholm University, he is principal researcher of the City Faces project, 2021-2025, funded by the Swedish Research Council.
