‘There is a Garden in her Face’: Madame Yevonde's Photographic Colour

Abstract

The work of the British portrait photographer Madame Yevonde from the early 1930s is distinguished by a bold and creative use of the new Vivex colour process. Her portraits, particularly those of society women, celebrate polychrome as integral to the image, colour as a type of excess meaning that is not accommodated by laws of narrative. Smith reads Yevonde's desire to embrace the potential of the colour photograph in terms of its dramatization of the widespread acceptance of the naturalness of black-and-white. With the availability of colour photography Yevonde's project is to make strange such an accommodation to monochrome while demonstrating the theoretical implications of the capacity for monochrome to hold the potential to register that which eludes it: colour. By bringing to the fore in her autobiography the legacy of formal innovation on the part of women photographers, and by exposing the inappropriateness of the new photographic colour to the subject of still life, Yevonde undermines a powerful assumption in the western tradition of a natural kinship of colour with the genre of still life.