•Life and Colour

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© National Portrait Gallery

Yevonde is a central figure in the history of British photography. She was a suffragette linked to the early feminist movements in the United Kingdom, and opened her studio in London in 1914 to dedicate herself to advertising photography and commissioned portraits, genres considered minor in which many female photographers, who were not welcomed in more prestigious fields, found a good space for professional development.

Yevonde quickly became a renowned portraitist, and was appreciated for her originality, her sense of humour, her balance between classicism and modernity, her experimental taste, and above all for her pioneering use of colour. Using the Vivex Natural Colour Print system –a variation of the carbro trichromatic process that uses a subtractive method with three separate layers, one for each primary colour– she immortalised singers, actresses, athletes, royals, and members of high society with unprecedented whimsy, freshness and daring, decades ahead of the image of celebrities as pop icons. “Each print is an experiment,” she said, “because colour photography has no tradition, only a future.”

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Yevonde Middleton (1893-1975) was a British photographer and a pioneer in the use of color in portrait photography. Born into a prosperous family in the London neighborhood of Streatham, she was sent to study in Belgium and France, where she came into contact with the suffragist movement. In 1914, at the age of 21, she opened her own studio in London, attracting prominent figures from the world of theater and literature, as well as members of the aristocracy. Starting in the 1930s, she experimented with color photography, using the Vivex subtractive color process, which marked the beginning of an intense period of creative activity. She became particularly known for her 1935 series Goddesses, a project in which she photographed women of high society. Her innovative work earned her recognition, including the attention of the royal family. Her legacy endures, and in 2023, a retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the National Portrait Gallery.