Yevonde Middleton, known professionally as Madame Yevonde, was a photographer from the early 20th Century, who was renowned for her vibrant portraits of 1930s society girls and as a pioneer for colour portrait photography. The images posted below are from a series of photographs titled ‘Goddesses’ from 1935, showing well-known subjects posing as mythological characters.
Yevonde was born in 1893 and grew up with a father in the manufacturing industry of printing inks, hence her fascination with colour. She apprenticed with Lallie Charles, the leading society portrait photographer of the time, and in 1914, at the age of 21, she set up her own portrait photography business. She slowly developed her own style of photography, moving away from the unfashionable, extravagant and romanticised Edwardian images of women in high collared gowns and big bouquets of fussy flowers, to a softened image with the sitter looking slightly away from the camera. Soon her photographs were being featured in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and her career reached a head when she was chosen for the official engagement photograph of Louis Mountbatten and Edwina Ashley, later 1st Earl and Countess Mountbatten of Burma. Frustrated by the limits of black and white photography of the time, Madame Yevonde set about mastering a new process, VIVEX, which created colour photographs with a subtractive process using three glass quarter-plates for the cyan, magenta and yellow separations.
The Goddesses series are currently being shown in an exhibition at the PM Gallery, London until July 3.
Photos: Be Original or Die
