
Madame Yvonne
- Publisher
- Filigranes Éditions / Compagnie Papier Théâtre
- Year
- 2020
- ISBN
- 9782350464886
- Specifications
- hardcover
210 x 290 mm
300 duotone photographs
264 pages
French
co-produced with Compagnie Papier Théâtre
"Madame Yvonne", an itinerant photographer, cycled the rural Trégor for over fifty years; from 1902 to 1952 she photographed on request children, families, weddings, threshings, festivals, communions, soldiers, the dead, the young and the old. Born in 1878, Yvonne Kerdudo moved to Paris at fifteen to work, came to photography through various encounters and trained with the Lumière brothers in the century's early years, returning to her native region around 1908 to set up on her own account until 1952, two years before her death in 1954. An emblematic local figure still remembered by elders around Plouaret, her glass-plate archive of 13,400 negatives, stored for over fifty years in her attic, was acquired by the Compagnie Papier Théâtre after contact from a great-niece in 2005, representing over 22,000 images, a genuine heritage treasure now being cleaned, digitised, dated and identified by a team of volunteers, with around 8,000 photographs identified to date after more than 4,000 volunteer hours a year for fourteen years.