Two girls pose for a photographer, their thick, brown hair softly knotted, wearing vintage kimonos that wouldn't be out of place in a high-fashion shoot. The backdrop features a lush pink rose trellis and wallpaper that looks like it was expensively sourced by a stylist. But despite their contemporary appeal, these photos were taken as early as 1908, when colour photography was in its infancy.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
And what makes this series even more remarkable was that it was a woman behind the lens - British photographer and artist Etheldreda Laing.
Laing turned to photography at age 23, not long after marrying barrister Charles Laing in 1895. She was smitten enough to build a darkroom in the couple's country villa, Bury Knowle, in Oxford, England.
Rolling lawns, tumbledown stone and rose-dotted arbours made Bury Knowle the perfect spot for a keen experimental photographer and in 1908 Laing became one of the first to try her hand at the colour process autochrome.
Invented by the Lumière brothers - better known for their pioneering work on moving images - autochrome plates achieved luminous hues via a filter made from microscopic potato-starch grains dyed red, green and blue-violet. When the plate was inserted into the camera, light would pass through it before hitting the photographic emulsion, colouring the resulting image. It was an expensive pastime: in 1913 a box of four plates of the size Laing used cost more than the average working man's daily wage.
Laing took to autochrome quickly, and her eye for composition and confidence with colour made her one of its finest practitioners. About 30 of her images are now at Britain's National Media Museum. "Many photographers struggled with colour when it came out," says Colin Harding, a curator at the museum. "They had dedicated years to mastering tone and found colour behaved completely differently."
Like many women photographers of her generation, Laing's pictures concentrate on her immediate surroundings, especially her daughters, Janet, born in 1898, and Iris, born in 1903. As a genteel woman, it would have been impossible for Laing to traipse around Oxford or take portraits of strangers.
Photography was, in fact, considered quite a respectable hobby for women. "It had lost its association with disagreeable chemicals in the 1880s," Harding says. "Several articles in the press around that time suggested it was perfectly suitable for ladies to dabble in."
Laing was one of several skilled female amateur colour photographers of the time - others included Sarah Angelina Acland and Emma Barton.
"I suppose these names are unfamiliar to us in the same way names of women artists are overshadowed by their male colleagues," Harding says.
Laing's portraits also have a remarkably relaxed feel. Autochromes required a lengthy exposure - about 20 times longer than black and white - but her daughters' faces show none of the strain of sitting still.
When she sold a dozen of the autochromes at Christie's in the 1970s, Iris said, "[My mother] had the gift of putting everyone at their ease."
By the 1920s autochromes had faded from use. Because they produced a transparency rather than a print, it was difficult to share images. Laing took up painting miniatures and eventually joined the royal miniature society. She continued to take photographs, primarily to record her sitters' faces for study, but also as a hobby, even after she and Charles left Bury Knowle in 1923 and settled in London, where Charles died in 1939, and Laing in 1960.
Bury Knowle House is now Headington Library, and the grounds Laing captured so vividly have become a public park.
