SPEAKER_02 0:07

Hello and welcome to the Gresham College podcast. Today I'm with Anthony Penrose. Anthony Penrose is a photographer, writer, and curator, and the son of Lee Miller, one of the most extraordinary visual witnesses of the 20th century. Through discovering her hidden archive and writing her biography, Anthony Penrose has helped authenticate her testimony and shaping major exhibitions and films about her life. Anthony has played a central role in bringing Lee Miller's work back into the cultural consciousness. And it's an honor for me to speak with him today. Anthony, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Thank you. It's really nice to be here talking to you again and having had that wonderful occasion at Gresham College a few weeks ago.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

Thank you too. And um, we had such a great time hosting you, and uh, we we really enjoyed the lecture and the audiences really enjoyed the lecture. So we thought we'd bring you back again today to speak more about Lee Miller's work and kind of get to really um understand your kind of perspective too. Thank you. Let's start with the kind of finding of these images. Um could you tell us a story about you finding the photography for the first time?

SPEAKER_00 1:16

It was just after my mum had died, about like a week or ten days, and my late wife, Susanna, was looking for baby pictures of me because we'd just had our first little baby daughter, and she wanted to compare did she look like me or not? And she went up into the attic because we were told there might be some photos out there, and instead of coming down with photographs, she came down with some sheets of manuscript on very thin paper, typewritten, and she said, I think you should read this. Susanna knew that I'd had a very conflicted relationship with my mum, because when I was growing up, she'd been an alcoholic for most of that time, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of what she'd experienced during the war. But of course, as a kid I didn't know that. I just thought that this person was really awkward, really difficult, um, you know, a kind of very unreliable person to be around. Uh, she was never violent, but she was very, very caustic with the way she used words. And it was it wasn't it wasn't a lot of fun. And I got the impression that she was just a useless drunk that hadn't done anything. So when I started reading these pages of manuscript, I was confronted with this extraordinary up close and personal account of somebody watching an infantry assault on a heavily fortified enemy position. And it reading further, it was like she had been joking with these guys like an hour before, and there they were being mown down by machine gun fire in front of her. And when I read this through, I thought it was the work of some hotshot life magazine reporter, you know, because that sort of person had been friends of my family. And I thought, who did this? And I showed it to my father. And he said, Yeah, I think I can help with that. And he went off and he came back with a back number of Vogue magazine. I think it was November 1944. And there it was, double page spread, with many other page chances as well. Double page spread, headlines, the siege of San Marlo from our own correspondent Lee Miller, who was there throughout the fighting. I thought, what? And if you like that was a kind of nexus point. It was a it was a life-changing moment. I didn't realize this at the time, but that is when I had to completely re-evaluate the process of understanding my mother's life and and what kind of a of a person she had been and what kind of achievements she'd had. Because up to that moment I had kind of written her off as being, you know, like I said, a useless drunk. So we dragged everything out of the attic, and overnight we became photographic archivists. And it was a very steep learning curve. There were something like 60,000 negatives. There were countless pages of manuscript, there were beautiful prints that she had made in her own studio in Paris or in New York, you know, going way, way back to the 20s and the 30s. And it it was just this incredible treasure trove, and it was like the entire output from this one photographer who by this time was unknown. Very few people remembered her as a fashion photographer. Nobody really thought of her as a Surrealist photographer, which was what she most clearly was. Uh, and she had allowed her career, well, she had wanted her career to become completely eclipsed and forgotten.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

And did you realize the significance of these images and like her work when you first saw them?

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Immediately, yes. Like I said, it was the writing that first drew me in. But then we started burrowing into the photographs. And indeed, they were the photographs that went with the writing. You know, massive great explosions, really, really close up. Extraordinary things. Uh, and then of course, we we were looking all through the war material and she fought her way across France and Germany with the Allies and ended up um liberating being at the liberation of the concentration camps of four of them, and uh photographing everything she saw on the way.

SPEAKER_02 5:49

That's so incredible. And I'm guessing, like, for I mean the audiences too, haven't seen the images. It's like, you know, these vivid, beautiful images. But you mentioned also the manuscript, too. Like that kind of vivid dream, that imagery was also like apparent in her writing. Can you talk to me about a little bit about that? How did you kind of take her writing and understand that her work was more than just the images, but also how she kind of like spoke about them?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

In a way, the writing for me was more personally moving than the images, because like I said, it was personal, it was her voice, it was her talking to us and describing what she'd seen because she writes in a very direct way. It's like a conversation, and it's it's kind of deceptively casual, but she's putting over these extraordinary things that she's seen in language that is so descriptive and so connecting. We can really be there with her. And in a way, that was for me more revealing of her as a personality than the than the images. Um a great many photographers can take the same image, few people can write in such incredibly moving words. And eventually we edited her war writings together to become a book. The li they it was called Lima's War, and it has a foreword by her wartime buddy David Sherman, and it's uh it's still in print, it came out in '92, and it's still very well received now.

SPEAKER_02 7:20

I think for us it's so interesting to kind of understand her and learn about her life. Um, but for you, you have that personal connection and that personal thread. Can you talk to me about how it was like learning about this woman who was your mother through her work, which she'd keep in kept hidden until you guys found it? What was that process like for you to read her or her writing and also see these images that she'd taken?

SPEAKER_00 7:42

It was a very long process because it was gradual. It wasn't some kind of blinding flash of of revelation. Uh, it was an incremental thing, and I began by being really impressed with just the range of her photography and the the kind of like the beauty of it in many ways, because she had come from an artistic background, she had really become a Sierraist photographer in Paris in 1929-32 with Man Ray, and that I think informed everything else that she did later. And so looking at these images, there was such a character and such a uh a wonderful personal interpretation in many of them, that that's I think became very revealing of her personality. But the rest of it came by degrees because as I started to research for my biography on her, I was very fortunate that Thames and Hudson took me on and they gave me a very generous advance, and that allowed me to go to the United States and travel and meet people who knew her and go all around Europe. And I and at that point, we were talking about the early 1980s, there were still a lot of people around who remembered her and had actually stood shoulder to shoulder with her when she was under fire in the war, or or goofing around in Paris, or or being in New York or whatever, you know. And so it was a wonderful opportunity, fortuitous moment, because all of those people are now dead, and I wouldn't be able to get the same depth uh and intricate detail that that uh that I was able to then. And so little by little I built up this picture of this person, and then I started writing, and it was deeply cathartic because I had had such a conflicted relationship with her, and I suddenly realized that, yeah, I'd got it all wrong. And my father was of the same opinion, really, because I brought back a whole lot of information on one of my research trips through America, and he said, uh, you know, I told him what had happened and what she'd done and her incredible bravery and and and all of that. And I could see him getting, you know, kind of quite emotional, which was very unusual for him. And he said, I wish we'd known. If only we had known, we could have understood her better and done more to help her. And that was really a you know a cry from the heart, and it was one that I echoed because there's an old saying, you can put up with a lot of what if you know why. And if only I had known why she behaved in this egregious, irrational fashion, I would have perhaps been more understanding.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

I think one one thing for me was you know, seeing her exhibition and really going through her life, because it takes you from her kind of like her modeling days all the way through like the work that she did in Paris and um seeing some of her acting career also, you know, and also the traveling that she did. I think that's what really kind of uh grabbed me was her attention to detail and the things that she chose to focus on, you know, as a photographer, her eye of choosing to focus on certain kind of whether it's culture or landscapes was so beautiful to me. Can you talk to me more about that kind of like her her traveling years and you know the kind of like the beauty of these images that she took.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

I think she could find beautiful images in most places that she went. And that was part of that surrealist quality that she was always looking for, the kind of like the not not obvious image, something that was a bit quirky. And of course in Egypt she found plenty of that. And that part of the exhibition, the Tate exhibition, which I think is a fabulously well done show, that part of the Tate exhibition was actually very, very well done, very well accentuated with I think the images that they chose. And not many other shows in the past have paid so much attention to the Egypt sequences. And in Egypt, she was married to a very rich man. She didn't have to worry about earning a living through her photography. She was well looked after. And so she could just take the kind of pictures that she wanted. And that's why we get these wonderful, really poetic, enigmatic images, which I think are absolutely some of the very best, most beautiful, free, unfettered images of her whole career.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

Is there an image that really stands out to you that you know that you can kind of end up thinking on or going back to from that kind of period in her life early on?

SPEAKER_00 12:40

The image that is still my number one image, and I think probably always will be. And look, I've been staring at this for 48 years now, is one called Portrait of Space. And it's a shot through a torn fly screen in uh in a little building in the middle of the uh Egyptian desert. And she's looking out at a landscape, there's a road leading away, and there's some hills in the background. And I think it represents her desire for freedom because although she was very well looked after in Egypt, she had everything she wanted. She was bored witless. The, you know, the social life was absolutely so not what she wanted. And she was pining for Paris, and she wanted that kind of emotional and artistic freedom that she would have had in Paris. And so when we look into the sky in this photograph, there is what looks like a beautiful big white bird, but in fact it's a cloud. But the idea is that you have to choose whether it's a bird or a cloud, whether it's a symbol of freedom or just nothing. And then there's a little rectangular frame, which is you used to have a flap on it, and you'd put your hand through to open and close the storm shutters on the outside. But the flap's gone, and it leaves just this rectangular portrait frame, and that gives it its name, a portrait of space. And that space is a gift to you for you to fill with your own imaginings, your own dreams, or whatever you want, or not, as the case may be.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

That's beautiful, and I think I completely agree. I think what also strikes me is the technical ability to take some of these images out in the desert or you know, on the road and all these things. I think most people don't understand the skill required to be able to capture these kind of moments that she was able to.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

This is the thing about being a photographer, is you have to be technically minded to get the results that you actually want. And she was. Her dad was an engineer. He brought her up understanding machinery and things like that. Her favorite toy when she was about eight years old was a chemistry set. You know, she had this scientific, this engineering background all the time, but that didn't stop her from using her artistic freedom. So all of the technology was actually a way of resourcing her artistic desires.

SPEAKER_02 15:10

And um, why do you think people are so drawn to her images now? Because I mean, there's such beautiful imagery, you know, but as we've seen from the kind of the Tay exhibition and all these things, there's such a popularity for her because people are responding so vividly. Where do you think that comes from? What why do you think we respond so positively to her work?

SPEAKER_00 15:30

I think what makes us respond is the fact that it's a connection to her standing behind the camera. We are looking at things definitely through her eyes. And we also know in the back of our minds that these images are shot on film. So they're not manipulated, fiddled around with AI or whatever in any way. We are getting what she wanted us to see, whatever it was, you know, 50, 60 years ago.

SPEAKER_02 15:59

I think for me, um, also going through her life and coming to a time where she was working for Vogue, you know, going from a um fashion photographer to a wartime photographer, especially in that time period, is such an impressive thing. And I think um more of us need to understand that how for the time that she was in, the work that she was doing, how important it was, was was very unique there. Can you talk about that? How difficult it must have been for her to be, you know, the kind of um artist and the kind of photographer she was back then.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

It was very difficult for a woman to succeed in in her realm. There were very few women photographers, and those that were are truly exceptional in in their roles because they had to be. They had to be, you know, three, four, five times better than the nearest man, technically and artistically, because there was such a discrimination against them. And I think one of the things that we can be most grateful for today is that that discrimination is lessening. Still got a way to go before it's where it should be, which is not existing at all. But we've come a long way since Lee's time.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

And uh coming on to our lecture, the lecture you gave at Gresham College, um, could you talk to me about what the idea of indelible images means to you? Because that was the title of the lecture that you gave.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

I originally created this lecture for um a Holocaust Memorial Day, and the idea behind it was what is it that gives us the evidence to support the knowledge that these things actually happened. And of course, photography is a very key point in evidence, and in that evidence, what is it that makes some images stand out more than others? Because you could get five people taking the same same view, and maybe only one of those, or maybe none of them, but mainly one would be the real standout image. What is it that makes that image? And I think a lot of it is the integrity behind the camera and the involvement of that person. Now, when Lee was photographing the Holocaust, it was very, very personal to her. Her buddy David Sherman, her American wartime buddy, who was like with her from when she landed in Europe to the time, the end of the war, he told me that she was walking around Dachau and Buchenwald and the other camps. He said, encased in an ice cold rage. And I think what makes Lee's images so important and so standout is that she had this passion, this absolute commitment, total commitment, to telling us what was going on, and she was using every part of her artistry, of her technical ability in creating those images. In many ways, she was doing it uh instinctively. She wasn't stopping and composing the shot, she was really just getting the best possible shot from where she stood. And that I think makes it even more immediate, even more real, even more vital. And so what we were looking at is what is it that makes these images indelible? What is it that when you've seen them, they burn their way into your memory? And we all know that there's no erase button for these really critical images. But what is it that makes them so kind of important, so poignant in the first place? And like I said, I think it's the honesty of the person that took the picture. You know, and of course the artistry, but it's mostly that that passion that drove them to get that image.

SPEAKER_02 19:55

Yeah, I think and also you mentioned there is that the evidence and leaving evidence for uh us to see and to kind of you know have that sense of responsibility. Um, do you think that's that was kind of like her kind of thinking? It was like we have to, because you know, we've seen some some of her vogue messages of like, you know, believe this now. Was that part of that responsibility on the future generations?

SPEAKER_00 20:17

I think she felt an enormous responsibility to tell us about what had happened. And when she when she sent her dispatch to Audrey Withers, her vogue London editor, she sent with it a cable that said, I implore you to believe this is true. Because already, even at that point, people were beginning to cast doubt on what had happened. They thought it was some gross stunt that the Allies had faked to discredit the Germans. And you know, Lee knew that these doubts were beginning, and she really wanted to be so clear with everybody that no, this is for real. And also for her in that moment, the war was very personal because when she'd gotten through to Paris, or even before, when she'd landed in France, she knew that the the French people had actually collaborated with the Germans in a big scale to round up Jewish people and to send them off for deportation, which actually meant forced work until they dropped or being gassed in a gas chamber, you know. So, one way or another, tens of thousands of French people were rounded up with the full complicity of the French government at the time and and murdered. And they were taking children, four, five, six years old children, just throwing them into these cattle trucks and hauling them off. So when Lee got to Paris and she's found so many of her friends were missing, this is actually, I think, a a key Moment because that's when she was determined to show the world what had happened to all of these people. You have to realise that in the centuries before history tells us that there were a great many pogroms right across Europe, and a great many Jewish people migrated towards France and Netherlands because they thought that it was going to be safe. And it wasn't. Because when the Nazis came, there was a concentration of them. And that's how they were all rounded up and learned.

SPEAKER_02 22:36

I think also the the work that Lee did was so kind of important, inspiring. But also I think it leaves a mark on someone to see some of those images and to be there and to have that. Um what do you think about the emotional cost of something like that? You know, like to share these images with us, the world, does that was that a struggle for her afterwards to kind of understand what she'd seen?

SPEAKER_00 23:01

The emotional cost was extreme. She was never the same again. And those who knew her at the time before and after realized that something had happened. And at that point, there was no understanding at all. There was no knowledge of what post-traumatic stress disorder was all about. There were millions of people suffering with it. So, you know, those who came back from the war, they'd all had similar traumas. Even the people who'd lived through the blitz in London or any place else in Britain. And the idea was that you put up and you shut up and you maintained a stiff upper lip because there were millions like you suffering, and you weren't going to be the first one to break down and let the side down and start blubbing, you know. So you put everything you could into hanging in there. Now, traumas just don't go away, and the more you repress them, the harder they the worse they become. So the really key moment in Lee's life was not so much while she was in Dachau, or even for the first few months after that. It was like for the first few years after that that it started to get worse and worse and worse and more powerful. And no wonder she drowned herself in alcohol, because that was the only way of kind of anesthetizing herself against those dreadful memories.

SPEAKER_02 24:28

Coming back to the lecture now that you gave, um, could you tell me what it was like to give a lecture about this? I know that you've been involved in exhibitions and films. Does the format change how you kind of tell a story?

SPEAKER_00 24:40

The format I use is to make it like a story. I don't want it to be didactic. Um what I want is for you to enroll in the journey and to experience if you can, if I get it right, you will experience some of the kind of emotional quantity that Lee was herself was experiencing. And it's inevitable also that you're picking up some of my emotion because I cannot look at those Holocaust images and remain dispassionate. I cannot look at the images of the children dying in the Vienna hospital and not be steaming angry because it's like, no, I wasn't there, but I can connect through to how it must have felt. And I can't look those little little young babies in the eye and not feel a connection to their suffering. And so, yes, um there's a passion in me to make this known in the hope that it goes some way to waking people up and stopping them from stumbling into repeating history, which just seems to be what we're out doing right now.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

I think the passion in that delivery of your lecture is evident. I think it makes it memorable for people because you deliver it, you know, um passionately, but also in this engaging way that makes people like the way you told the story, it brings us closer to her experience and makes us kind of understand her story, her pictures a little bit more. And I think that's you know, seeing those images and seeing your way of telling it side by side was really um for me anyway, like really impactful.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Thank you. I I'm glad it came across because it is something that is really important to me, as you can as you can gather.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Of course, yeah. Of course. Um, we have some audience questions that from that lecture actually that I wanted to ask you. Um one of them asks, is Lee Miller's photographic archive safe for eternity?

SPEAKER_00 26:51

Oh gosh. Well, I mean, in practical terms, photography is a very fragile medium because you know it's chemical based on materials that are really always trying to self-destruct. So we are doing our best. Um we keep everything in a controlled environment where it's the temperature and the humidity are controlled. And our longer-term plan is to um put the key negatives into deep freeze so that they're then um they're then kind of like uh I think stuck forever like that. But the idea that we can do this is simply because we're now digitalizing many of the images, and that means that we don't have to drag the image out, the drag the negative out of its file, put it in the enlarger, make the print, which is all wear and tear on that particularly important item. And so now we have these beautifully made digital images, and we can use them to reprint the images, reprint the photographs from. And it's digital printing has come on so fast and so far that the the digital images that we have now, I'm very pleased with. And that I hope will continue to preserve the actual physicality of the negatives and the prints as well. How do we go about ensuring that there are still people there to look after it and you know, to maintain the air conditioning and to look at and and to make the stuff accessible to others? Well, my daughter Amy and I have worked very hard. She's been on the on the case for nearly 27 years now. Um, I've been on it for 48 years. And who's going to look after it when we're gone? Well, what we're doing now, we're working on making it into a foundation, making it into a trust, so that hopefully it will have some perpet perpetuity after we've gone. And um that's the next step.

SPEAKER_02 28:58

I think that's amazing. I think that's super important because you know these images are a indelible, but also kind of like really important for the culture, as you've kind of said.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Well, thank you for for realizing that, because yes, it is more than just a pile of old negatives. This is a huge piece of history tucked into them, yes.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

Exactly. The one another audience member asks, um, if Lee were alive today, what do you think she would be taking pictures of?

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Okay, if she was fit and you know, as gutsy as she was during the war, she would right now be in Gaza. She would be photographing the genocide that's taking place there every day, and every day it's getting worse, despite what people are are saying. She would probably be in Ukraine cheering on the Ukrainians and you know, trying to bring an understanding of what they're suffering and what they're putting up with every day. Um, or she'd be in Somalia, looking at those hundreds of thousands of refugees who are being so miserably treated at the moment. She would be, I think she would be wherever she felt the world needed to look to see atrocity and injustice. Another uh audience member asks, how accurate was the recent film adaptation of her life? It was extraordinarily accurate. Of course, we had to change some of the sequencing because uh we're cramming an an amazingly full lifetime into two hours. And so, I mean, simple things like, no, Lee and Roland did not meet in the south of France, they met in Paris and so on. That's okay because what we've done there is the uh we get all the characters together right at the beginning of the film. There's a good piece of plot exposition there, and on we go from that moment. But it also gives you that fantastic contrast of the of the free uh joyous quality against the war. We were very, very careful to be as militarily and historically accurate as possible. Um we had to, of course, compress Shorten and everything else, but mm the major incidents that you saw in the military side, Siege of Saint Malo uh and the uh you know the liberation of the camps and travelling across Germany and Paris liberation too. They were actually very well supported by other documentation as well as our own. So we we were really careful about getting that right. And we wanted to make sure that we would not be accused of falsifying the evidence in any way.

SPEAKER_02 31:38

Um another question is uh what do you think she might have left out of the uh record of her images? Do you think there was anything that during her travels that she just just um decided to leave out?

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Oh, I think she left out a lot of of horrors. I mean, in one point in her in her um manuscript she says, don't believe that just because I haven't photographed them, that every town and every village in Germany has not got some um awful atrocity in it. Uh I mean that's not that's a paraphrase. But um that yes, she she um obviously edited what she was photographing because for one thing the amount of film she had was very critical. She she had to be very stock conscious, uh, and the other thing was that there was no point in shooting stuff that she knew wasn't gonna get printed. So she was very careful uh with her her film and also with her endeavors. Now um that is I think important to remember because there was a lot that she saw that she didn't photograph. And when I began researching this, I wondered, okay, did she go light on us? You know, with with the Holocaust. And so I went to Dachau and they let me look through their entire photographic archive of shots that they had. And in a way, I don't think she went light on it. I don't think she spared us at all. There were things that she didn't photograph, but maybe she didn't see them. The most disturbing things I saw in that archive were pictures of women just about to be murdered, pictures of babies that had been murdered, and so on. She didn't photograph them, but probably she didn't see them. So if she had seen them, I think they would be in the files.

SPEAKER_02 33:37

Do you think we're more ready to receive her work now than her own era? Um, do you think because of that time we can, you know, look back and these images have more of an impact?

SPEAKER_00 33:48

It's very hard to say because what's happening now is there's a dreadful degradation of truth. And we see so many AI images which are completely false, that I think that gives people doubt as to whether Lee's images are authentic or not. Well, of course, Lee's images come from a negative. And, you know, I have that negative in the files. I can prove that really happened. So whether people are more or less receptive or not, I don't know. I have a nasty feeling they're less receptive because there is a kind of a deadening of truth and belief um through all this AI stuff every every day. And also I think there's a degree of compassion fatigue that's kind of quite prevalent. You know, we have today in our newspapers, television, everything, we we're regularly confronted with some really appalling things, but but it doesn't seem to get any traction anymore. You know, it's just sort of okay, that's another another ten children died on the shores of the Mediterranean or something. It's almost like an oh, so what? And that I think is a dreadful dulling of humanity's responses.

SPEAKER_02 35:13

Yeah. I think um just from my experience of seeing it, seeing the exhibition, I think what it offered me was that look into that kind of history and that um ability to look it in the face and then have have the understanding of I don't we don't want to repeat that. So I think that's what can you know, I think our generation or you know, people looking at it now can have that perspective where it's like we see these images and we see we know a place that we don't want to go and that might you know motivate motivate us or get us to think more deeply about ourselves. So I think um these images exist and then you know the contrast of you know just the time that she lived in and her ability to get these images to us um and your work in that has been super important.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

One of the uh lines of poetry I'm most fond of of um quoting is George Santeyana. And uh he was the guy that wrote, Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it. And this is so true now. Right now, we're about 1934 in terms of the way the freedom of press, the freedom of of expression is being limited a little bit more every day. It's a kind of ratchet system. The way that there are kind of like mass killings going on in Gaza all the time and that sort of thing. And we're accepting it. This is the appalling thing. And so, yeah, we have to be so alert and on guard that we are not going to repeat the the rise of the of the of the Nazis in the way that they did. And it's all it's all out there, it's all waiting to happen, but we have to stand up and push back against it.

SPEAKER_02 36:53

And so thank you for your work in doing this, because you know, putting on this exhibition, again, Lee Miller's work out there, and you know, sitting with us and having the lecture that you did, these are all really important actions towards that. So thank you for your time, thank you for the lecture that you gave, and thank you for speaking with me today.

SPEAKER_00 37:09

And thank you for helping get Lee's work out there. That's important. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

Thank you very much.