“I think we must all agree,” the British photographer Yevonde declared in 1921 to the Professional Photographer’s Association in London, “photography without women would be a sorry business.”With a focus on female representation, “Yevonde: Life and Color,” a vivid display of her idiosyncratic oeuvre at the city’s newly reopened National Portrait Gallery, argues for her role as a pioneer of color photography.
Born Yevonde Cumbers in South London in 1893, she was known professionally as Madame Yevonde, rarely by her married name (Mrs. Edgar Middleton).
On her own terms, she used the singular Yevonde, with which she signed her prints, exhibition invitations and 1940 autobiography, “In Camera.”After a succession of private schools in the home counties and a convent school in Belgium, Yevonde was sent to a finishing school in Paris.
Though her teachers there dismissed an impassioned essay she wrote on Mary Wollstonecraft, Yevonde returned to England a convinced feminist in 1909, at the height of the women’s suffrage movement.
After a stint marching, chalking sidewalks and selling papers for the Women’s Social and Political Union, Yevonde glimpsed potential career independence in the examples of two successful woman photographers, one of whom employed her as an apprentice.
Persons:
Yevonde, “, Madame Yevonde, Edgar Middleton, Mary Wollstonecraft
Organizations:
Professional Photographer’s Association in, Political Union
Locations:
Professional Photographer’s Association in London, South London, Belgium, Paris, England