Page 112 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 112/146
Note that during the 1920s and 1930s there was no single ‘standard’ of colour photography, various entrepreneurs and processing companies were experimenting and competing to find the best col- our process that married ease of use, economy of manufacture, and perfection of colour reproduc- tion. The most successful of these various methods were the Tricolor Carbro process (used by Ou- terbridge) and the British Vivex process (used by Madame Yevonde among others) - but each of these tri-colour processes were complex, required very careful colour-separated exposures, and very precise registration in the print-making. They were really only suitable for artist-photographers like Outerbridge and Madame Yevonde London, specialising in ‘arty’ society portraits.
Yevonde Cumbers ‘Madame Yevonde’: Goddesses series c1935.
Madame Yevonde (Yevonde Cumbers 1893-1975) had her own studio age 21 in London, special- ising in society portraits. In 1936, along with many others she saw the first London Surrealist ex- hibition, curated by the English poet David Gascoigne, and the year before she had seen the Olympian Party - a charity ball held at Claridges, London, where debutantes and other society women dressed-up as Greek gods. She asked these ladies to recreate their roles in her studio, and made a series of over 30 colour prints, using various lights, filters and adjustments of the Vivex colour process, to achieve these surrealist-inspired colour images.
https://www.npg.org.uk/shop/prints/madame-yevondes-goddesses-photographs
I spoke to the poet David Gascoigne in the 1990s, and he recalled having to rescue Salvador Dali - who had attended the 1st London Surrealist exhibition opening in a deep-sea diving suit, but neglected to check his air-supply before making his spectacular appearance - saving his life by clearing the air-intake. The Surrealists had from the beginning, recognised the value of press publicity and the staged publicity shot
These colour prints by Mme Yevonde are truly spectacular for their time - a terrifically effective marriage of aesthetics and colour technology. - They are an early example of an artist experi- menting with the kind of image-colour-processing that nowadays many of us perform ourselves in software like Adobe Photoshop (from 1990), but in the 1930s required a detailed technical un- derstanding of photo-chemical processing and the effect of colour dyes - and necessitated work- ing closely with technicians, and thoroughly understanding the complex optical-chemical pro- cesses, in order to achieve the desired effect.
https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/a-short-history-of-colour-photography/