CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/24/2023

Pleasure, pathos, and above all, originality, in this holiday staff pick

Featured photograph—“Dorothy Gisborne (Pratt) as Psyche” (1935)—is reproduced from Yevonde: Life and Colour, the first comprehensive monograph on the subtly radical, previously overlooked British studio photographer whose motto was “be original or die.” Published to accompany the critically acclaimed exhibition on view now at Laing Art Galley in the UK, this 240-page hardcover is a universal staff favorite Holiday Gift Book for 2023. Feminist (suffragette), inherently experimental and gifted with a bold sense of humor, Yevonde opened her first studio in 1914, at the age of twenty-one, and went on to pioneer the nascent technology of Vivex color photography. Not only was color photography obscure and even considered vulgar at the time, but successful women professional photographers were then rare. “Mrs. Gisborne posed as Psyche,” Yevonde is quoted in the book, describing this recently discovered, previously unpublished photograph of the London society figure. “Her mournful brown eyes, exquisite mouth and fair hair seemed to me to express the pleasure as well as the pain that Psyche was force to endure.”