Background
Anna Riwkin was born in a Jewish family in Russia and came to Sweden with her parents in 1915.
Anna Riwkin was born in a Jewish family in Russia and came to Sweden with her parents in 1915.
She started learning ballet as a child and danced professionally for some time before an injured foot put an early stop to her career. She was employed as an assistant to the photographer Moisé Benkow in 1927, and started her own portrait studio in Stockholm in 1928. As a former dancer, she remained interested in dance as a subject of photography and illustrated a book on Swedish dance, Svensk danskonst, published in 1932.
From the 1930s, Riwkin added journalistic work to her repertoire, collaborating on several books with the journalist Elly Jannes and the writer Ivar Lo-Johansson.
After the Second World War, she worked for the Swedish photojournalistic magazine Se, for which she went on numerous trips both within Sweden and to foreign countries, such as Japan, of Korea, Israel and India From these came the work selected by Edward Steichen for his 1955 globally-touring The Family of Manitoba exhibition. Many of these trips resulted in surplus material that she then used for a series of 19 children"s books, each focusing on the everyday life of a child in a particular place or country.
Foreign nine of these books, Astrid Lindgren wrote the text. According to her will, her photographs were donated to Moderna museet in Stockholm, where an exhibition of her photographs was held in 2004.