Yevonde - "Be original or die"

View From ... The Gallery

A new exhibition of the influential portrait photographer's work...

 Yevonde Middleton burst onto the photography scene in 1914 when she opened her first studio in Victoria Street, London at the age of just 21.

Yevonde - self-portrait

Originating from a well-to-do family in London, throughout her career she was simply known as Yevonde. 

From the 1920s until her death in 1975 she took stylish photographs documenting the movers and shakers in the British arts, fashion, politics and high society.

Her breakthrough came with the ability to take colour photographs using a new technology called Vivex. Invented by Colour Photography Ltd of Willesden, it entailed overlaying three negative plates using the primary colours of cyan, magenta and yellow. 

The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne is showing 150 examples of her work until April 20. 

As camera equipment and development in the 1920s and 30s were primarily studio-bound, Yevonde concentrated on taking colour portrait photographs. The prints were then sold to wealthy clients who had an interest in the subject sitting for her.

She obviously had a remarkable knack of putting her subjects at their ease with a huge variety of poses, costumes, and facial features with a high proportion of subjects gazing sidewards into the middle distance. It must have taken hours to arrange them in this way.

Colour portraiture

Business was good. Yevonde’s career coincided with an explosion in demand for pictures and photographs in newspapers and magazines. This was the post-First World War age of increased literacy and the cinema.

Of course, the most obvious thing to note was that Yevonde was a woman, a pioneering one at that, operating in a man’s world.

The exhibition doesn’t make a song and dance about this. 

Divided into chronological sections,  it effortlessly glides from her experimental beginnings through to her later years when she declared she “would like to pull her horns” from day to day photography.

Experimental photography such as 'double-headers'

Celebrities of their day such as George Bernard Shaw, Vivien Leigh, the Earl and Countess of Mountbatten and John Gielgud are all captured on camera at this show. In amongst them are dozens of portraits from a bygone age of aristocrats, high society figures, debutantes and actresses.

But then there came a change. During the Second World War the invention of Kodachrome killed off the Vivex colour photography labs overnight. Kodachrome was more advanced, easier to use and, importantly, enabled colour photography in the field, not restrained by studio-bound kit.

The demise of Vivex signalled the end of Yevonde’s unique brand of colour portraiture.

However, the exhibition continues to show her post-war output with a range of fascinating work including a surrealist spell and black and white studies of swinging sixties intellectuals and influencers of their day.

“Be original or die” was Yevonde’s battle cry. This exhibition certainly shows why.