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Dorothy Wilding began her photographic career as an apprentice to Bond Street photographer Marian Neilson. Wilding was the first woman to be appointed as the Official Royal Photographer for the 1937 Coronation and opened a second studio in New York in the same year. She is best known for her brightly lit linear compositions photographed in high key lighting against a white background. Her autobiography In Pursuit of Perfection was published in 1958. Her surviving archives were presented to the National Portrait Gallery by her sister Mrs Susan Morton 1976 and formed the basis of a major NPG retrospective exhibition and catalogue in 1991, The Pursuit of Perfection". (Source: the National Portrait Gallery online catalogue)