Olive Edis died on 28 March 1955 in Sheringham, Norfolk, the town where she had built her celebrated photography studio.
Olive Edis died on 28 March 1955 in Sheringham, Norfolk, at the age of 78. She had spent much of her working life in this North Norfolk coastal town, where she and her sister Katharine established a photographic studio that attracted both local fisherfolk and members of the aristocracy, including royalty.
By the time of her death, Edis had largely receded from public prominence, but her reputation as one of the first women to be officially commissioned as a war photographer, and as an early adopter and popularizer of the autochrome colour process in Britain, endured in photographic and historical circles.
Her legacy was substantially revived in later decades through the efforts of archives such as the Imperial War Museum, the Royal Collection, and Cromer Museum in Norfolk, which preserved and exhibited her negatives and prints. Retrospective exhibitions and research projects, including the Olive Edis Project, have since reintroduced her remarkable body of work — spanning portraiture, documentary war photography, and pioneering colour imagery — to modern audiences, cementing her place in the history of British photography and women's contributions to visual documentation of the twentieth century.