It's a tribute from one great photographer to another. On Monday April 3 world-famous Rankin will be featuring in a BBC-Mustard TV documentary honouring the remarkable Norfolk pioneer portraitist Olive Edis. Trevor Heaton reports.

Eastern Daily Press: Olive Edis: The Sheringham-based photographer had a remarkable 55-year career.Olive Edis: The Sheringham-based photographer had a remarkable 55-year career. (Image: Archant)

Both photographers, but at first glance the glossy, jet-setting milieu of Rankin might seem a world away from the homely Sheringham studio which was once the centrepiece of Olive Edis' life.

And where Rankin - a man so famous he just goes by his middle name - can call upon the latest digital sophistication and lighting techniques, Olive had to make do with the best that her Edwardian era could provide: a cumbersome plate camera and the light that streamed in from her studio windows.

But the two have much in common, having both photographed some of the most famous people in the world. Whereas Olive captured the shy future George VI through her lens, for example, Rankin has portrayed the king's daughter, Elizabeth II, through his.

And there's more than that: a heartfelt respect from the celebrated fashion and portrait photographer for the work of Olive. Now that link has inspired a fascinating new documentary produced by Eye Films, and commissioned in partnership with Mustard TV, which is being screened on Monday April 3 on BBC One East at 7.30pm.

In the programme, Fishermen to Kings: The Forgotten Photographs of Olive Edis, we follow Rankin as he comes to Norfolk to find out about Olive and tries to replicate the methods she used to take pictures.

The title of the documentary is an echo of the title of a hugely-successful exhibition held in the winter at Norwich Castle Museum. Cromer Museum holds the largest collection of Edis' work in the world, thanks to a far-sighted 2008 purchase of photographs, prints, 1800 glass plate negatives and autochromes (early colour photographs).

In the documentary, written and directed by Clive Dunn and produced by Charles Gauvain, Rankin finds out more about the life and work of Olive, who in her remarkable 55-year career took thousands of photographs, including four prime ministers, and towering literary figures such as Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw - but also hundreds of ordinary people. Her pictures of the fisher-folk of Sheringham are not only beautiful works in their own right but also serve as a valuable social history archive.

When Olive died she left her equipment and most of her photographs to a local Sheringham man who had assisted Olive in her later years. For 50 years the collection was kept hidden away in her old studio and it's only thanks to the dogged persistence of a Norwich photography historian that the archive was eventually brought to wider recognition.

When the collection was put up for sale, Cromer Museum, part of Norfolk Museums Service, was able to raise the money to house the many thousands of photographs.

The documentary will also show how Olive was very much a pioneer, a self-taught business-savvy woman in a profession dominated by men. Her skills also led her to be commissioned by the Imperial War Museum as an official war photographer - the first woman to hold this remit from the IWM. Her views of war-ravaged Flanders and northern France are a powerful testimony of man's inhumanity to man.

'The work that Olive did was very sophisticated and very much at the cutting edge of what photography was at the time. It draws me in and is very magical and it reminds me of why I love photography,' Rankin said.

His exploration of Olive's life and work culminates in a visit to her studio in Sheringham, left as it was since she last used it.

Armed with Olive's unwieldy glass plate negative camera, he was challenged to take a portrait in her style and his chosen model is the actor Bernard Hill.

'My reputation was on the line to see if it actually worked. But apart from that stress, I enjoyed being able to handle a camera of that age and quality.

'To see how she worked as a photographer first-hand was exciting and then of course to see the result was a relief!' he added.

Fishermen to Kings: The Forgotten Photographs of Olive Edis, is broadcast by BBC One East at 7.30pm on Monday April 3. The documentary will also air on Mustard TV later in the month. There is a display about Olive's life and work at Cromer Museum, behind the parish church.