Merlyn Severn (1897 – 1973) was an English photographer. She spent seven years working as a photojournalist in Africa, but is most remembered for changing the direction of dance photography from focusing on posed photographs to action shots.

Life

She was born Dorothy Susan Harvey on 8 August 1897 in Chelsea, London, to civil servant Sir Paul Harvey and his wife Ethel, née Persse.

During World War II, she worked for the WAAF in radar, and spent a period of internment on German-occupied Guernsey.

Later in life she lived in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, before returning to live in Aller Park, Devon, and she died in Devon on 12 November 1973.[1]

Photographic career

A self-taught photographer, she photographed Michel Fokine’s Blum Company in their opening season in June 1936, which led to a book, Ballet in Action; a one-person show; and six photographs being accepted by the London Salon of Photography in 1937.[2][1] Particular in her methods, she used ultra-speed film imported from America to allow her to print exhibition-quality prints directly from negatives.[3] Her use of dance action shots was innovative,[4][5] and she defended it in the introduction to her book.

Between 1945 and 1947, she was a full-time staff photographer for Picture Post. Working freelance for the same paper, Severn spent seven years in Africa, covering stories in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. She collaborated with Hugh Tracey on African Dances of the Witwatersrand Gold Mines,[6] and wrote an account of her travels, Congo Pilgrim.[7]

In 1956, she wrote an account of her photographic career, Double Exposure.

Works

  • Ballet in Action (1938)
  • Sadler's Wells Ballet at Covent Garden (1947)
  • (with Hugh Tracey) African Dances of the Witwatersand Gold Mines (1952)
  • Congo Pilgrim (1954)
  • Double Exposure (1956)

References

  1. 1 2 "Severn, Merlyn [real name Dorothy Susan Harvey] (1897–1973), photographer". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/69508. Retrieved 2024-01-10. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ↑ Merlyn Severn (1938). Ballet in Action. Internet Archive. Oxford university press.
  3. ↑ Barabanov, Alexander (2012-03-31). A Dance. Random House. p. 87. ISBN 978-1-4090-1985-5.
  4. ↑ Karthas, Ilyana (2020). "Arbiters of taste: Women, modernism and the making of Paris". French Cultural Studies. 31 (2): 97–110. doi:10.1177/0957155820910718. ISSN 0957-1558. S2CID 218953658.
  5. ↑ Carroll, Mark (2011). The Ballets Russes in Australia and Beyond. Wakefield Press. p. 210. ISBN 978-1-86254-884-8.
  6. ↑ Nettleton, Anitra (2017-05-04). "Dress and a Fashioned Identity among Black South African Migrant Miners in the Mid-Twentieth Century". Critical Arts. 31 (3): 18–34. doi:10.1080/02560046.2017.1383490. ISSN 0256-0046. S2CID 149074002.
  7. ↑ Severn, Merlyn (1954). Congo Pilgrim. Museum Press.
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