Yevonde: Life and Colour - by Clare Freestone (Hardcover)

About the Book

This hardcover book accompanies our exhibition Yevonde: Life in Colour, the first exhibition dedicated to Yevonde Middleton since 1998 which explores the story of her life and career. This illustrated publication showcases the work of Yevonde, providing in-depth context to her images.--

Book Synopsis

The first comprehensive monograph on the forgotten radical innovator of color photography and mythic, surreal portraiture

The British photographer Yevonde was a businesswoman and tireless creator; as an innovator committed to color photography when it was not considered a serious medium, her work is significant in the history of portrait photography. Yevonde's portraits embody glorified tradition countered with a desire for the new; her most renowned body of work is a series of women dressed as goddesses posed in surreal tableaux from the 1930s. Yevonde championed photography during a time when there were few women photographers working professionally, and this book tells the story of her life, her works and her 60-year career.
Yevonde: Life and Colour brings the photographer's works together for the first time in 20 years. With an abundance of reproductions, and featuring previously unpublished works, the book showcases her experimentation with a range of techniques and genres including color photography, portraiture, still lifes, solarization and the Vivex color process, and repositions her as a key modern artist of the 20th century. It also provides in-depth context for Yevonde's images, considering their aesthetic and mythic references.
Yevonde (1893-1975), also known as Madame Yevonde, was a London-based photographer of portraits and still lifes whose motto was "be original or die."

Review Quotes

The operatic effect was further heightened by her use of a color printing process that rendered hyper-rich hues she believed especially suited to female subjects whose "exquisite complexions and coloured fingernails came into their own." This quote and others from the book reveal Yvonde to be a somewhat complex protofemini--Albert Mobilio "Hyperallergic"

In Yevonde's hands, color created a space to experiment and explore with the painterly qualities of the form. She cast leading stars of stage and screen like Vivien Leigh and John Geilgud as gods and goddesses sent down to earth, capturing the surreal space where they were both human and divine in a world just starting to modernize.--Miss Rosen "Blind"

Yevonde elevated artifice and performative mise-en-scène to new, dreamlike ends.--Emily LaBarge "The New York Times: Arts"

Yevonde understood that colour was a potent avenue into the realm of feminine fantasy...[she] embraced the full range of its possibilities.--Rosalind Jana "British Vogue"