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Images Captured by the UK's First Female War Photographer Are Going Online

A UK museum was awarded £81,000 to digitize the works of Olive Edis.
A photograph of a battlefield in Ypres, Belgium, taken by Olive Edis in 1919. Image: Cromer Museum

Few may know about the pioneering works of photographer Olive Edis. But now, a UK museum has won an £81,000 grant to create an interactive website of her works and writing, bringing Edis' work online for the first time.

Edis is considered Britain's first female war photographer—and along with being among the first to adopt the autochrome photo coloring technique, she was also a savvy businesswoman who joined in the effort to advance women's rights in the UK.

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Alistair Murphy, curator of the Olive Edis Collection at Cromer Museum, told me that the aim is to organise all 2,000 images currently housed at the Cromer museum onto a website. The grant will enable museum staff to collate all of Edis' photographs and journals—stored in different museums across the UK—on one website. Murphy said he wanted people to be able to both access and comment on the images, wherever they may be in the world.

"We have a lot of photographs and we don't know who some of the people in them are. We're hoping that people in the local community and further afield will be able to identify them," Murphy told me.

A portrait taken by Olive Edis of a fisherman from Sheringham. Image: Cromer Museum

Olive Edis was born in 1876 in Norfolk, a county in the east of England. Upon her father's death, she set up a photo studio business in nearby Sheringham, a seaside within the county. Primarily a portrait photographer, from 1905 to 1955 Edis photographed everyone from royals and politicians to local workers.

Recognizing her talent, in 1919 the Imperial War Museum commissioned Edis to photograph the impact of the First World War in Northern Europe, and capture images of people and landscapes—in particular, women in the armed forces.

"Edis went out to [Belgium and France] with two other women connected to the Imperial war museum. They drove around in a car in Northern France, then drove up to Belgium, where Edis took photographs not only of women and soldiers, but also extraordinary pictures showing the devastation the war had reaped on the landscape in Europe," said Murphy.

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Edis was also one of the earliest users of the autochrome technique, which was patented in 1903 by French photographic equipment pioneers, the Freres Lumières (Lumières Brothers). The technique was the first commercially available color-process technique used in photography before subtractive color film was invented in the mid-1930s.

A color self-portrait of Olive Edis. Image: Cromer Museum

The technique, explained Murphy, relied on taking photographs through a color filter. In this process, the filter is created by dying fine grains of potato starch red-orange, green, and violet. This mixture is then layered finely onto a glass plate. Any gaps between the starch grains are filled with lamp black (a fine sooty material) and the plate is subjected to pressure before a silver bromide emulsion is applied. The tiny potato grains each act as filter that permits "corresponding colored light to pass through and expose the emulsion."

"The actual color images that were created were almost pixelated," said Murphy. "It's not exactly a true colour process in that if you magnify the image that's been created it has little green, red and blue dots. So in a sense, it's almost a very early digital image."

Edis mainly used glass plate negatives from when she started photographing in 1905 right through till the 1930s.

"She used those very old fashioned cameras on tripods that people used by putting black capes over their heads. They use a black and white negative, but with a colour filter that creates the colour image," he explained.

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While Edis' contribution to photography is incontestable, Murphy said that the four-year project at Cromer Museum would also focus on Edis as a person, and her contribution to women's rights in Britain.

"There were quite a lot of female photographers around in Edwardian times (1901-1910), but one of the things that distinguishes Edis is that she had to make a living out of it, and her professionalism shows in her photographs," said Murphy.

As well as being a prolific photographer, Edis was an astute businesswoman who owned studios in Sheringham, London, and Farhnam in Surrey. "Edis was an independent woman, who went about doing the kind of work that had previously been associated with men," said Murphy.

A portrait taken by Olive Edis of Nancy Astor, the first woman to obtain a seat in the House of Commons. Image: Cromer Museum

With the First World War in full swing, enormous socio-economic and cultural shifts shook Britain. As increasing numbers of men joining the war effort and travelled to the Western Front, women took over the reigns in Britain, and asserted their place more aggressively in the economy and society. The shifts led to a rise in women campaigning for votes—whom Edis captured with her lens—and winning that right in 1918. Notable British women photographed by Edis include; Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman who qualified to be a doctor in the UK; Henrietta Barnett, an eminent philanthropist; and Nancy Astor, the first woman to take a seat in the House of Commons.

While Edis will be remembered for her strength of character, her portraits offer a historical portal onto British people from all walks of life.

"She had this uncanny ability to capture people—whether they were fisherman or George the sixth—looking incredibly relaxed," said Murphy.