Hedda Ekman was daughter of Colonel Josef Gabriel Richert. She married the businessman and Member of Parliament Johan Ekman in Gothenburg in 1881 and subsequently embarked on writing a chronicle of the family’s life, Familjen Johan Ekmans Krönika, 1914, 1918-1923, which comprised four parts; the final part was published posthumously in 1979 by her daughter Birgit.
Hedda Ekman was an excellent photographer, and her album-like memoirs portray in exquisite, aesthetic forms an image of family life in the Swedish upper class at the turn of the century. Hedda Ekman’s surviving account of her childhood in the liberal circles of Gothenburg is kept at Kvinnohistoriska Arkivet (the National Resource Library for Gender Studies) in Gothenburg.