The Machine Worker in Summer, 1937
Permaprint day-transfer print from original negative.
Madam Yevonde She setup her own portrait studio in Victoria, London establishing a very different approach to photography by placing her sitters against dark background with faces well lit but turned slightly away from the camera. It is however for her mastery of the VIVEX process for which Madam Yevonde is best known. This process used three glass quarter-plates for the cyan, magenta and yellow separations, Which were proceeded separately and then brought together at the printing stage to produce an image with full color range. As the process used pigments and not dyes and could be manipulated at both the exposure and printing stage it led to vibrant color with a destiny and richness unachievable in other photographic processes of the day.
Madame Yevonde was born inCumbers in 1893, to a wealthy family in Streatham. At 16 she was shipped off to stifling convent schools in Belgium and France, which left her with a desire to be as independent as possible and a passion for the suffragette movement. But on her return to Britain, Yevonde studied with the London society photographer Lallie Charles, turning down an apprenticeship with Lena Connell, the suffragette photographer. At Charles’ Curzon Street studio Yevonde spent an apprenticeship cajoling Edwardian ladies into insipid poses on Empire chairs and bearskin rugs while they clutched bouquets of silk roses. After a year she transferred to ‘The Works’, the production side of Charles’ studio, and learned printing and retouching.
Round about 1925, she also began to undertake advertising work and other commercial assignments for magazines and started exhibiting her work at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society.
The rich colour resolution obtained with the process, with strong luminous reds and yellows and vibrant highlights, ideally matched her own extrovert personality. By 1932, Madame Yevonde felt sufficiently confident of her mastery of the new medium to rent a gallery and hold her first full-scale exhibition of her work consisting of no fewer than 70 images, half of them in colour. When Madame Yevonde called in with her portfolio, they were completely bowled over and commissioned her to supply four images of artists and craftsmen at work decorating the interior of the ship.
Madame Yevonde continued working almost exclusively in colour right through to the end of the decade, despite the looming threat of war, resonances of which crept increasingly into her work. For Madame Yevonde, this was a bitter blow, bringing to an abrupt end a period of the most intensely dedicated and uniquely creative pioneering work in the whole history of colour photography. At the end of the war, she moved back into London again and continued to work at the Berkeley Square studio, with all its memories of happier times. VIVEX, however, was dead and buried, and although other colour processes became available in time, Madame Yevonde very rarely used them, deeming them all far too crude in comparison with VIVEX.
When the lease on the Berkeley Square studio ran out in 1955, Madame Yevonde found other premises just off Knightsbridge, close to Harrods' store. Other work featured in a Royal Photographic Society exhibition devoted entirely to women photographers in 1958. Around this time, Madame Yevonde also started experimenting with solarisation, while an exhibition at her Knightsbridge studio in 1961 entitled 'Dove or Predator?' featured a series of portraits of women in which she attempted to divide them broadly into these two categories. Pride of place went to portraits of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, photographed at the Jubilee Palace in Addis Ababa, as well as portraits of other members of his family, and some of his pet lions.
The 1968 exhibition 'Some Distinguished Women' featured some of the famous women she had photographed over the course of her long career, but also included a number of portraits specifically taken for the exhibition. To celebrate Madame Yevonde's eightieth birthday and her sixty years in portrait photography, the Royal Photographic Society mounted an impressive retrospective exhibition consisting of about a hundred of her best images covering every aspect of her vast and memorable output. The exhibition and the interview were a fitting tribute to her as an artist and a champion of women's rights, as well as a great pioneering spirit.
Despite failing health, Madame Yevonde continued working to within a few months of her death in December 1975.
Reference
www.madameyevonde.com
http://www.users.waitrose.com/~felice/
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