Yevonde - National Portrait Gallery, London - Tri-colour portraits

[richyd]

I have just visited this exhibition - https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2023/yevonde-life-and-colour/

and was astounded. A very interesting person in her time and as a photographer who, in the 1930's, starting using a commercially available tri-colour process called Vivex (check out the Vivex one shot camera). The original prints look fabulous, but her whole archive was bequeathed to the NPG and with some sponsorship from Chanel they have now produced new prints from the negatives using carbon transfer process. There is a wealth of information about her work and the printing process.

I had never heard of her before, but some of the portraits reminded me of the colour work of Erwin Blumenfeld in the 50s. The one of Vivien Leigh is particularly striking and the Vivex print of Joan Maude, red hair, red, red dress, red background. She even experimented with Sabattier, as did Blumenfeld in his earlier work. If you are in London, do check it out, something different and interesting.

 

[koraks]

There's additional info here: https://groups.io/g/carbon/topic/99767679#13695

The thread above included a video link where the project is discussed, especially by Katayoun Dowlatshahi, who was responsible for making the carbon transfer prints:


One of the interesting things Katayoun had to deal with, was the color rendition, for which she had to go explore the pigments that would have been used for the original prints. Some of those pigments were not of the same quality (especially lightfastness, but also chroma/saturation) as the pigments we'd commonly use today for color carbon (or inkjet, for that matter). There were also interesting challenges with getting these pigments to work with the DAS carbon process that Katayoun uses (like most color carbon printers working today). The pigments used also have totally different colors than the C, M and Y we're used to today, and are in fact closer to an R, G and B set. The net result is that the colors are more subdued than if they would be made with modern pigments.

I think Katayoun worked with digital scans of the original negatives, output to imagesetter negatives for color carbon printing (as seen around the 3 minute mark in the video).

I hope to be able to see these prints one day myself. In terms of color printing, this is IMO just about the most fascinating and inspiring thing that can be done at this point.