A long-overdue exhibition of the work of photographer Yevonde Middleton (1893-1975) has opened at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), London. Yevonde: Life and Colour is the first major exhibition since the gallery reopened its doors, following a three-year refurbishment.
Throughout her life, Yevonde was a vocal advocate for women. In her youth, she was a suffragette. And she championed women within photography throughout her long and successful career, gaining wide recognition in her own day. She is best known as a society portraitist and an early pioneer of colour photography at a time when commercial colour photography was new and there was widespread scepticism about its merits.
However, as with so many women artists, Yevonde’s work has been underrepresented by galleries. It wasn’t till 2021 that the NPG acquired a collection of Yevonde’s colour negatives creating its Yevonde Colour Archive. A painstaking digitisation process provided the opportunity to reassess this artist’s colour work – much of which has never been seen by the public.
