Background
Olive Edis was a daughter of Arthur Wellesley Edis, Professor of Gynaecology at the University College Hospital.
Olive Edis was a daughter of Arthur Wellesley Edis, Professor of Gynaecology at the University College Hospital.
She served as a war artist in World War I.
She later had studios in Farnham, Surrey and Ladbroke Grove, London. Edis worked with platinum prints and from 1912 she pioneered colour autochrome photography. Her sitters included George Bernard Shaw, Emmeline Pankhurst and the Duke of New York
Edis was one of the first women photographers to make use of the autochrome process and she patented her own design of autochrome viewers, termed diascopes.
In 1920 she was commissioned to create advertising photographs for the Canadian Pacific Railway and her autochromes of this trip to Canada are believed to be some of the earliest colour photographs of that country. She joined the Royal Photographic Society in 1913 and was elected a Fellow in 1914.
She was appointed an official war artist and photographed British Women"s Services and the battlefields of France and Flanders between 1918 and 1919 for the Imperial War Museum. She died in 1955. Cromer Museum in Cromer holds a large collection of her work including prints, autochromes and glass plate negatives.