Initially working with platinum prints, she was also one of the first photographers to experiment with autochrome photography and even patented her own design of autochrome viewers, termed diascopes. In addition Edis was one of the first professionals to use a “kinematograph camera” – she started making films in the 1920s, including filming the wedding of Mr Henry Deterding of Holt, and a film of the Netherlands entitled “Life on the Waterways”, sadly both now lost.
Excerpting the same article we learn:
Olive Edis was born in 1876 in London. Not much is known about her early life, but her father Arthur Wellesley Edis was a fairly prominent Professor of Gynaecology at the University College Hospital and author of several books on women’s health.
Her great uncle on her mother’s side was Surgeon General John Murray (1809-1898), a very early photographer (mid 1800s) who took some of the earliest photos of India and it was his daughter Caroline who apparently gave Edis her first camera.
In 1928 at the age of 52 she married Cambridge academic Edwin Henry Galsworthy, a cousin of the celebrated novelist John Galsworthy.
She died in 1955 at her London studio at 32 Ladbroke Square, London. Her ashes are interred in Sheringham cemetery along with the body of her husband Edwin, who died in 1947.
This picture of Olive Edis is dated to 1919 and is described by the Norfolk Museum as
"Photograph, glass plate negative of Miss Edis (with Cat), by Mary Olive Edis 1919"
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