Olive Edis

While researching the career of Christina Broom, the UK’s first female press photographer, I also came across the work of her contemporary Olive Edis.

Like Broom, Edis was a self-taught photographer. Like Broom, she became a photographer to provide an income due to a family crisis, in this case the death of her surgeon father when she was seventeen (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Edit clearly came from a more affluent background than Broom, and had been given a camera by her aunt, the daughter of photographer Dr. John Murray. Again like Broom, she began by making postcards of local views, evidently a popular product at the time, but she soon moved on to making portraits.

Edis operate two studios: in Notting Hill; and in Sheringham, Norfolk. In Norfolk she photographed local fisherman among others, but in London she pursued famous people for her subjects, clearly with some success because her subjects included George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy and Arthur Balfour (National Portrait Gallery) as well as members of the Royal Family. The only suffragette she seems to have photographed was Emmeline Pankhurst (Fig. 1), and this was presumably because Pankhurst was famous enough to enter into Edis’ pantheon.

Fig. 1 Emmeline Pankhurst
by Olive Edis © National Portrait Gallery, London

Edis was also a pioneer of the autochrome – the earliest type of colour photography. Only a few years after it was invented in 1907 by the Lumiere brothers (Science and Media Museum), Edis won a medal for her Portrait Study in the 1913 Royal Photographic Society Annual Exhibition (Fig. 2). She became a Fellow of the Society the following year, one of the first women to do so.

Fig 2. Listing of entries for the 1913 Royal Photographic Society annual exhibition showing Edis’ medal-winning autochrome Portrait Study

Fig.3 Olive Edis self-portrait. Autochrome. By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23979659

 

Apart from her other achievements however, Edis is a significant figure in the history for reasons unrelated to her portrait work. She was the first British official woman photographer sent to a war zone. Commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in 1918, the war was over by the time permission was granted by the British Authorities in March 1919 (Imperial War Museum).

Because of her enforced arrival only after the cessation of hostilities, Edis’ work is a kind of ‘late’ photography – if not intentionally so – ninety years before David Company wrote about this concept in his 2003 essay Safety in Numbness (Campany, 2003). Campany makes a distinction between this early 21st century choice of style and the visually-similar image of Fenton from the Crimea and Brady from the American Civil War. He sees the former as images frozen by the limits of the contemporary technology – long exposure times and bulky equipment – whereas the work he classifies as ‘late’ photography is a conscious interruption of the constantly-moving stream of video reportage.

Edis’ images from the immediate aftermath of war on the Western Front show a different kind of snapshot: although she did photograph the desolation of the battlefields, most of her photographs are of British women at work in roles important to keeping a devastated France and its allied forces functioning. Beyond the clichéd image of the nurse, she captured canteen workers, clerks and administrators, engine workers, telephone operators, drivers, and gardeners maintaining war graves.

Fig. 4  Members of Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliray Corps (QMAAC) machine room that formed part of the RAF engine repair shops at Pont de l’Arche. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205244004

Fig. 5 Gardeners from the Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps tending the graves of the war dead at Etaples. © IWM Original Source:  https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205194668

 

Edis’ depiction of women at work foreshadowed the demand by women for a greater role in British society after the war, with the first votes for (some) women granted in 1918 and suffrage on the same terms as men achieved in 1928. The percentage of women in full employment rose from 24% in 1914 to 37% in 1918 (Bourke, 2003). Although there were setbacks after the war as men returned and unemployment rose, the war opened up to women a wider range of employment opportunities and in particular reduced their dependence on domestic service as a source of employment.

References

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [online] at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-54348?rskey=dkGw89&result=1 Accessed on 14 June 2018

National Portrait Gallery [online] at: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp10088/mary-olive-edis-mrs-galsworthy  Accessed on 14 June 2018

Science and Media Museum [online] at: https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/autochromes-the-dawn-of-colour-photography/ Accessed on 14 June 2018

Imperial War Museum [online] at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/british-women-photographers-of-the-first-world-war Accessed on 14 June  2018

Campany, D (2003) Safety in Numbness [online] at: https://davidcampany.com/safety-in-numbness/ Accessed on 14 June 2018

Bourke, J (2003) Women on the Home Front in World War One [online] at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwone/women_employment_01.shtml Accessed on 14 June 2018