Anthony will be delivering a lecture tonight on Lee Miller's indelible images. Welcome, Anthony Penrose. Thank you, Julian. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for coming out tonight on this wet evening. Indelible images. We are bombarded with images every minute of every day. They just come at us. Some are interesting, some are just rubbish. Images are important to us. Since the beginning of time, man and most other creatures on this planet rely on sight for survival. Images and the ability to interpret them and remember them for future reference, that's deeply ingrained in us. Movie makers tell us that 75% of the information we receive in a movie is visual. Some movie images have the power to haunt us, the indelible quality made more vivid by their ability to move. When you listen to a play on the radio, I expect you conjure up your own images to fit the story. But amid this blizzard of images that confront us every second of the day, what is it that distinguishes some of them? Do you hold on to them because they're intimately personal? For you, they're indelible. Because they connect to your memories of a treasured moment. Of course, you hold on to them. The tactile memory might fade over time, but the image itself will live with you as a surrogate memory. Some images have extreme aesthetic quality, a raw beauty that makes them lodge in your memory. Or perhaps there is something characterful about them that makes them stay in your mind. The most deeply indelible images have an assertion that overrides our will and fixes them forever in our minds. Many people, myself included, know there is no erase button for these images. They're traumatic for us and for the photographer who took them. They stay with us for the rest of our lives. This is my mum, Lee Miller. She knew a lot about images, and she knew a lot about the trauma of gathering them. She learned photography from her father, who had his own amateur dark room. He encouraged her to play rough and adventurous games with her brother from an early age. They grew up in a small upstate New York town called Poughkeepsie. When she was a teenager, she went to New York, entered art school, and one day she was walking along the pavement. She stepped off to cross the road in front of an oncoming truck, and she would have been killed, but a man had been watching her and he grabbed her and he hauled her back onto the pavement with inches to spare. And she did the girly thing. She fainted in his arms. Good choice, Lee, because the guy's name was Condé Nast. Owner of Vogue magazine and Vanity Fair, and within a few weeks she was front cover, Vogue March 1927. She was not yet 20 years old. This brought her to the attention of Edward Steichen, Vogue's chief photographer, and Steichen found she had the perfect looks for that period. And his photographs of her made her into what we would today call a supermodel. Coast to coast, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. But after about a year, maybe 18 months of all of this, Lee decided that she wanted to become a photographer. She had watched Steichen and those others who had photographed her, she'd watched them very carefully, and she wanted to become a photographer. So she boarded a liner with her best girlfriend, Tanja Rahm, heading for Paris, because that's where she heard there were these people called surrealists, and among them was the American surrealist photographer, Man Ray. She went and found him. She became immediately his lover, his pupil, his model, his studio assistant. And Man Ray was very generous and encouraged Lee with her photography. I don't know what kind of camera she's holding here, but she very quickly bought one of the very first Roloflex cameras produced, twin lens reflex, made in Germany. And she started cruising Montparnasse, taking pictures like this. I call them the found images because you know how fond of the found objects the Sierra Vists were. Well, these are found images. And she just snips them out of life and gives them back to us. She calls this exploding hand. Actually, this is the glass door to the Girland Perfume Shop. So many of the clientele have been wearing diamond rings that the diamonds have scratched that opaque area on the glass. And so she waited for the woman with the couture gown, the manicure, the diamond ring to put her hand on the handle, and then shnick, that soft shutter of the rollerflex, gave us back this image. And very often you'll find that she does just snip images out of life and give them back to us. Between the two of them, Lee and Man Ray rediscovered the technique that they called solarization, this very surreal quality where some of the images reversed in a secondary exposure. Well, less than a year from arriving in Paris, Lee had her own studio going a few blocks away from Man Ray. And to save money, she started modeling for her own shots. And indeed, this was published Vogue in America, September 1930, together with another shot by Lee. Well, 1932, Lee decided to go back to New York. She and Man Ray were having a difficult time. She went back to New York, she established her own studio, Lee Miller Inc., and she began by taking photographs of pack shots for advertising and in-store promotions. And then she became the place to go for studio portraits. This lady is Mary Taylor. This is Lillian Harvey. These two women were actresses on Broadway. They wanted really commanding pictures to send to Hollywood casting directors. Two years on, 1933-34, a guy shows up. This man, Aziz Eloy Bey. He had met Lee in Paris years before, when Lee had photographed his wife. He had divorced his wife by now, and he rocked up in New York, and he asked Lee to marry him. And to everyone's shock and horror, she did. The studio was a tremendous success by that time, but with no notice, she just quit, hopped on a liner with Aziz, and went back to live a life of luxury and indolence in Cairo. Aziz was very wealthy. There was not a thing that Lee could lack except mental stimulation. She so missed her friends in Paris. She missed the people around her, the buzz of the Cyrilis, the excitement. The most exciting thing her fellow expatriates could talk about was the cucumber sandwiches at the bridge party. Unsurprisingly, she grabbed her camera and she went off in the desert making long-range excursions. It was tough. The cars were only two-wheel drive, they kept on getting bogged down. There was no sat nav. They navigated using a sun compass across these trackless expanse of raw desert. She found her way to the monastery of Wadina Trun, photographing the sensual breast-like domes with the irony that inside them were the celibate Coptic monks. She found her way across the desert to the oasis of Siwa. And on that journey took one of the most indelible of her images. She called it Portrait of Space. It was a little house built as a halfway point for King Fouad on his journey. So it had European windows with fly screens. But now the fly screen has broken. It's like she's waiting to burst through that hole, disappear off down the road. In the sky, is it a bird? Is it a cloud? You choose. And then there's that hatch. The hatch was there to put your hand through to close the storm shutters, but the flap has gone. It's just left us this portrait style frame. She calls it portrait of space. And that space is her gift to you for you to fill with your own dreams and your imaginings. Aziz knew how much Lee missed her friends in Paris. He gave her an airline ticket to Marseille. She boarded a train. She arrived in Paris, and the night she arrived, she went to this fantastic party. All the Surrealist friends she'd ever had were there, including a stranger, this quiet, shy, rather tweedy Englishman, knew his way around Paris because he'd been living there for about 11, 12 years. He was a British Surrealist artist, Roland Penrose. He would later become my dad, but he didn't know that at the time. He said meeting Lee for the first time was like being struck by lightning. It was love at first sight. They were inseparable for the rest of that summer. They went to the south of France to meet up with the old friends they had in common. On the left of the picture, that's Paul Eloir and his wife Noosh. On the right, in the hat, that's Man Ray. And the first serious girlfriend in his life, since Lee has left five years earlier, Adi Fidelin. Picasso was also there and he took a big interest in Lee. The following year, 1938, Lee and Roland met up in Athens and they made a long road trip through the Balkans to Romania. They knew the war was coming. They knew Romania had oil and the Nazis were likely to take it over. So they wanted to see what was going to be the last chance to witness this wonderful, innocent, rural way of life, the life of these country people. Already a level of persecution had begun. The authorities, partly out of fear of the Roma spreading typhoid, had forbidden them to move and to enter the markets. And this amounted to the end of their way of life, in many cases, ending their lives. For a nomadic culture, to stop moving is to start dying. Worse was to come. Roland could not live without Lee. In 1939, he went to Cairo. He met Aziz. Aziz knew Lee was unhappy in their marriage, and having met Roland, he was satisfied that in him Lee had found the right person to love her and to care for her. He gave her freedom, he gave her his blessing, he gave her money, he gave her a steamship ticket to London. And she arrived eventually on the 3rd of September 1939. The day war was declared. To begin with, she worked from the Vogue Studios because a lot of the men had been called up for duty. And while she was taking pictures of the frocks and the handbags, the blitz was beginning. And it was as though this had been designed as something for Lee to photograph. She documented everything that was going wrong. In 1940, there were raids on 76 consecutive nights, except for one night, November the second, when inexplicably the Luftwaffe stayed home. And Lee caught it like this: one night of love. And that shows how humor can make an image indelible. And surrealism was always present in Lee. She called this exceptional achievement. And I think if you look at Mrs. Gander, Mrs. Goose there, she is saying to the gander, what are we going to feed it on when it hatches? And this poor little innocent tree in Charlotte Street is now an unexploded bomb. But in the studio, Lee was taking fashion pictures because Vogue editor, the remarkable Audrey Withers, saw the duty of the magazine was to provide elegance and beauty to distract everyone from the horrors of the war. Sometimes Lee's fashion shots were a bit too challenging. This one was never used. In a way, it's a reaction to the triviality of fashion when other really serious things are happening in the street outside. Lee knew all this time, though, that in occupied France, some of her dearest friends were enduring terrible hardships and danger under the Nazi occupation. And Lee knew that she would never be given a gun to shoot or a plane to fly. But she had her camera, and that became her weapon of choice. These are ATS women. They're operating a searchlight. Their work was highly dangerous because when the German bombers came over, they shot straight at the searchlight crews. 743 of these women were killed, wounded, or missing in action. The Women's Royal Navy Service, the Wrens were mainly responsible for jobs like operating and maintaining and testing radios. Many of them were armorers. They did just about every non-combatant job there was. Incredibly skilled, incredibly responsible. Audrey and Lee wanted to show Britain the massive contribution the women were making to the war effort. This woman is a torpedo mechanic. If she or her mates get it wrong, there's enough explosives stacked around them to take the whole of Gossport off the map. The Normandy landings came on the 6th of June 1944. About five weeks later, Lee was there at the evacuation hospital of Breckfield, just back of Omaha Beach, the scene of the fiercest fighting on D-Day. The unruffled calm of this surgical team becomes even more admirable when we learn from Lee's notes that shells were bursting nearby, and everyone knows a canvas tent is no protection against shrapnel. Lee covered all aspects of this amazing work and filed over 10,000 words and more than 40 rolls of film. It was published in Vogue September 1944, titled Unarmed Warriors. Her stories dominated Vogue features for the next year and a half. Her next overseas assignment became her first experience of combat. She found herself caught up in a pitched battle as the Germans occupying the centuries-old fortifications around the port of San Malo ferociously resisted the U.S. 83rd Division. Women war correspondents were strictly forbidden to enter combat zones, but Lee was determined to take her chance and quickly became indistinguishable from the GIs. She covered the fighting for four and a half days, witnessing the shilling, the bombing raids, with bombs weighing nearly a ton each, and none of this bothered the Germans much as their fortress was tunneled into solid granite. But then Lee witnessed a napalm strike. It was only the third time this weapon had been used. The burning liquid entered the ventilation shaft, sucking out all the oxygen and threatening to detonate the stores of ammunition. Colonel von Auchloch, a veteran of Stalingrad, had vowed to fight to the last man. But after the napalm strike, he wisely surrendered and Lee scooped that moment. And she found she had plenty of time to write her San Marlowe story because the U.S. Army put her under house arrest for violating the terms of her accreditation. But she got out in time to join the race for Paris and arrived during the Liberation. She described the streets filled with screaming, sheering, pretty people. She went to Picasso's studio. He nearly fell over backwards when he opened the door and found she was there. He hugged her, he kissed her all over, and then he stood back and he said, C'est incroyable. It's incredible. The first Allied soldier I should see is a woman, and she is you. I mean, not even his Picasso could get his head around that quickly. But not even Picasso or Paul Eloard or any other of her friends could keep Lee in Paris in the winter of 44-45 because some of the toughest fighting of the whole war was taking place in the Vosges and the Ardennes. The Germans had their backs to their own frontier. They were fighting with incredible ferocity. Lee was there. She was there when the Allies punched into Germany at several fronts in the spring of 1945. Bonn. Hundreds of people died in a direct hit on an air raid shelter here. Cologne, the oldest cathedral in Europe, nearly reduced to rubble. We can get a hint of the anger driving Lee forward in this moment. The Allied advance had been so swift the Germans had not been able to clear their own dead, like this boy in an anti-aircraft battery. Lee's caption for this image hit me hard. She wrote, This is a good German. He's dead. I thought, how can you look into the face of a teenage boy and be glad he's dead? Frankfurt, the roof of the Festhaler transformed into the giant spider's web. Ludwigshaven, the Allied bombing had destroyed the vast chemical plants. Lee noted that whole streets were dyed bright colours by the spilled chemicals. When you spot the soldier there, you get an idea of the scale of that place. Nuremberg, the ancient city, founded in 1050. It had been pounded to dust by the vast raids of the Royal Air Force January 2nd, 1945, and women cooked carp they'd caught in the river Pegnitz over open fires amid the ruins of their own home. In Leipzig, Lee encountered some deaths she did not mourn. Kurt Lisso, the city treasurer, his wife, and his daughter, and some of the military people, had killed themselves. They had thought it was the Russians attacking the city. It was a very bad idea to be captured by the Russians if you were a Nazi official. It was an even worse idea to be captured by the Russians if you were a Nazi woman. So they all crunched their cyanide capsules and died. Lee visited four concentration camps inside Germany. Odurf, Pennink, Buchenwald, and Dachau. This is the gates of Buchenwald. The sign translates colloquially as you get what you deserve. How could anyone deserve this? Li arrived in Dachau on the 30th of April. It was the first day of its freedom. There'd been a brief firefight the night before when the camp was liberated by the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the US Army. These prisoners, mainly Dutch, are seen singing their national anthem. They were relatively new arrivals in the camp. Most others were not in such good shape. Some of these images are from Buchenwald, some are from Dachau. The exact location makes little difference. The appalling suffering of man's inhumanity to man was universal to both camps, and the hundreds of other similar camps scattered across Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied territories. Lee's wartime buddy, David E. Scherman, was with her. He told me she was encased in ice cold rage. By now the war was very, very personal to Lee. When she arrived in Paris, so many of her friends were missing. No one knew what their fate had been. Now she knew and she would never forgive. In Dachau, in a street beside the camp, they found a train halted outside the gates. It had left Buchenwald 30 days earlier, loaded with 3,102 prisoners. The GIs found one survivor. The rest had died of starvation. They died of thirst. They died of exposure. They died of disease. Some had been beaten to death, others had been shot, and in every single case it was murder. They were all unarmed civilian prisoners. The battle-hardened G.I.s who had fought their way across Europe and had seen every battlefield horror imaginable could not comprehend the scale of this atrocity inflicted on civilians. In the camp, Lee visited the living quarters, a series of wooden huts crowded with triple decker bunks without blankets or even straw holding two and three men per bunk, many of whom lay too weak to move. In the few minutes it took Lee to take her pictures, two men were found dead and were unceremoniously dragged outside and thrown on their heap of dead bodies outside the block. So that the wagon that makes the rounds every day can pick them up like just so much garbage. The bodies were piled in heaps outside the crematorium. The furnaces had run out of coal five days earlier. So there was no hiding the evidence. Many prisoners wandered helplessly and uncomprehending, endlessly scavenging the rubbish heaps for clothing, or the greatest prize of all, a scrap of food. Some of the guards had put on civilian clothing, but the prisoners recognized them and beat them mercilessly. The GIs put them in their own jails for their protection. One guard killed himself, he hung himself sitting down. And this man, Klaus Horningck, remained defiant to the end. And outside in the streets of the neat little town of Dachau, the population tried to pretend they had no knowledge at all of the camp. British Vogue published very few of Lee's words and her pictures, but American Vogue ran many images. The headline reads, Believe it. Lee had cabled to Audrey Withers the words, I implore you to believe this is true. She was aware that people were already denying the Holocaust and she wanted her evidence as a witness to be made known. We have to ask, if we're going to be objective, how reliable was Lee Miller as a witness? I've studied the US Army records and the official histories produced by Dachau KZ and Buchenweld KZ Museums. They accurately support the facts behind Lee's photographs and her writings. But there's something else. There were other witnesses. This is the already mentioned David E. Sherman, a very distinguished Life magazine combat photographer. Sherman and Lee met as two Yanks in Britain in early 1943. And with Roland's blessing, Sherman moved into the home he shared with Lee 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, and it became a menage à trois. At Sherman's suggestion, Lee had applied for military accreditation, soon equipped with a chic uniform and her own AGO passcard, which gave her privileged access to military areas. And although initially assigned to the U.S. Navy, Sherman met up with Lee in San Malo, and they stayed together as a formidable journalistic team right up to the end of the war. I met Sherman in 1976. After my mum died, he became indispensable in setting up the Lee Miller archives. I spent weeks in his American home. He gave me hundreds of hours of interview with incredible attention for accuracy, for dates, places, people's names. I could never have written my biography, The Lives of Lee Miller, without him. He wrote the foreword for Lee Miller's war. Sherman was unimpeachable. He was there for most of Lee's war. He absolutely corroborated her evidence. It was he who described Lee Miller as being fiercely intolerant of sham, and he valued her honesty above all. I've had the privilege of connecting with other witnesses. In December 2007, this lady, Marianne Sweeney, came to visit me at the Lee Miller Archive. She was researching the history of her father who had died when she was five years old. Captain Joseph Bernard Sweeney served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army for four years and was awarded the Bronze Star. He had been one of those surgeons in the Brickville Evacuation Hospital. We searched the files. But most of the doctors were masked. It was so frustrating. We might have been looking straight at Captain Sweeney as he worked away as part of this extraordinary team, yet we could not identify him. Then Marianne showed me this shot her father had taken on his own camera, and I knew we had a match. The frame of his picture is a rectangular format, and it has a different focal length to Lee's. But the photographs separated by a very short time, marked by the fact that in Captain Sweeney's shot, someone has opened the door on the far side of the cattle truck, perhaps in the hope of finding a survivor. Captain Sweeney's next picture shows he went round the other side of the rail car and photographed through the newly opened door. So was Captain Sweeney in the photograph by Lee Miller. The soldier on the right is wearing a uniform and carrying a sidearm, a pistol, that is, that suggests he was an officer. Was he Captain Sweeney? Could the soldier on the left walking away be Captain Sweeney just after he's taken his picture? Marianne had two other photos taken by her father. This one taken further along the train, and this one. And then I realized it was a chilling familiarity. It's the reverse angle of this photograph by Lee Miller. If you have the determination to carefully study the way the bodies are lying, you'll find the two images are the reverse angles of each other taken almost simultaneously. It is possible to find where the photographer was standing when the picture was taken. By working backwards from the image, the camera axis on camera on Captain Sweeney's shot shows that he is the soldier on the right of Lee's picture. Seen here adjusting what looks like a folding Kodak, that camera would be consistent with the format of his negatives. And by the same process, we can also conclude that the figure in the background of his shot is Lee Miller with her Roloflex, calmly photographing her version of this devastatingly awkward scene. The story didn't end there. Five years later, Marianne sent me this shot. Do you remember I told you the GIs found one survivor? Well, one of the soldiers who found the survivor was Captain Sweeney. Both our parents had suffered badly with post-traumatic stress in the years after the war. Neither had ever spoken about the extraordinary things they'd witnessed and the heroic things they'd done. And looking back on their eyewitness photographs, can there be any real doubt about the authenticity of these images? If there is, bring it on. I want to hear it. And in a minute you'll understand why I have little patience with Holocaust deniers, because this story is about to get even more personal. Well, that night after Dachau, Lee and Sherman drove about 30 kilometers down the road to Dachau, where they were invited by the Signal Corps. Sorry, they drove about 30 kilometers down the road from Dachau to Munich. And they were invited by the Signal Corps to share a luxurious billet in Hitler's apartment. It was probably the only building in Munich to have coal. So it had hot water in the tub. Lee hops in first, and they set the shot up. The photo on the edge of the tub is a picture by Hitler's revolting personal photographer called Heinrich Hoffmann. The image was a sacred Nazi icon used in the most popular posters of that time, well known throughout Germany and through German occupied territories. It reads Einvolk, Einleich, Ein Fuhrer, Gross Deutschland. One race, one nation, one leader, great Germany. You can imagine how I feel when certain international leaders start talking about making something great again. Doesn't anybody remember what happened last time? Anyway, it's not the photograph that's the key to this. It's the boots. Because the morning of this day, those boots had carried Lee Miller around Dachau, and now she is stamping the filth, the ash, the horror, the degradation of that place into Hitler's nice, clean bath mat. She's not sitting there as a guest. She's a victor, metaphorically grinding her heel into Hitler's face. And she dried herself on his lemon yellow bath towel with its AH monogram. And there's something else. Completely unknown to Lee and to Sherman, way across Germany at 4.45 that afternoon in Berlin, Hitler and Eva Braun had killed themselves in their bunker. They hung around Hitler's apartment for a couple of days, and then they drove down to Berchtesgarden, onto Wochenfeld in Obersalzburg, Hitler's Alpine headquarters just outside of Berchtesgarden. The retreating troopers had set fire to it. I visited the site in 2005 with a couple of German historians who were making a radio program about Lee. I stood in the same place where Lee stood to get this picture. At this point, Lee and Sherman were unsupported in enemy territory. They were actually three miles ahead of the front line of the army. They must have abandoned all caution, as from one angle they were silhouetted against the fire, and from the other against the skyline, perfect targets for a sniper. I stood there sixty years and ten days later, the same time of day, the same weather. Not a trace of Hitler remained except for a little wooden peg right here. And that the historians told me is where the peg marks the corner of where the house once stood, and where Sherman had stood holding Lee's flash gun. Working with the historians, I discovered that despite the claim by the French army to have got there first, it was Lee, Sherman, and two unnamed GIs in a Jeep that were first on the scene to witness this momentous funeral pyre of the Third Reich. Justifiable reason to crack open the bottle of champagne they'd looted from Hitler's cellar. A few days later, the war was over. Sherman was recalled by Life magazine. He turned west, back to Paris, London, and New York. Lee turned east to follow the GIs into Austria and Hungary. Wherever she went, she encountered an endless stream of refugees, displaced people, liberated prisoners of war, trying to get back to their homes if they still had homes or even countries to get back to. There was no sign of the brave new world. Everyone in the free world had fought for it. She felt that the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians had died for nothing. She felt the desolation of the countless refugees trying to reach their homes. She reached Vienna. The fighting had been intense as the Russians and the Americans simultaneously advanced on the city. Today the city bears no trace of the conflict. But then it was wrecked by Allied bombs and the fires that followed. St. Stephen's Cathedral had been badly damaged and lost most of its roof. Today the opera house is now beautifully restored to its former glory, but when Lee arrived, it was a total ruin, bombed and burned out. Lee photographed Ermgard Siefried singing an aria from Madame Butterfly on the stage, accompanied by the contrapuntal crash of falling masonry. It was symbolic of the triumph of culture and beauty over destruction. But she found few triumphs in the Vilhelmina Children's Hospital. The black marketeers had stolen all the drugs, exactly as was portrayed in the movie The Third Man. She wrote in a dispatch that unsurprisingly was never published in vogue. For an hour I watched a baby die. He was dark blue when I first saw him. He was the dark, dusty blue of these waltz-filled Vienna nights, the same color as the striped garb of the Dachhouse skeletons, the same imaginary blue as Strauss's Danube. I'd thought all babies looked alike, but that was healthy babies. There are many faces for the dying. This wasn't a two-month baby. He was a skinny gladiator. He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched. There was nothing to do in this beautiful children's hospital with its nursery-rhymed walls and screenless windows, its clean white beds, its brilliant surgical instruments and empty drug cupboards. There was nothing to do but watch him die. This tiny baby fought for his only possession, life. As if it might be worth something. As if there weren't a thousand more right there on the doorstep of the hospital, waiting for a bed as an arena for their losing battle. Lee got through to Budapest. It seems hunger, poverty, and endless suffering were everywhere she went. There was still no sign of that brave new world. Her disillusionment was intense. She witnessed the execution of Laszlo Bardoshi, the fascist ex-prime minister of Hungary. Not even killing fascists brought Lee any relief from the intensely bitter disillusionment that had settled on her. She went on into Romania. She found the Roma and Sinti people she had photographed before the war had mostly been murdered by the fascists. By now, she was utterly exhausted. She was ill. She was drained of the will to carry on. Roland had written her endless letters imploring her to come home, but she didn't answer him. It was only occasional news from Audrey Withers at Vogue that told him where she was. And then Sherman sent her a telegram. It simply said, Go home. Lee cable back. Okay. Roland met her in Paris. He was horrified. She was so beaten down. So ill. So destroyed almost. He gently brought her home to London and she had become a very different person. She had changed so much. Soon after he met her in 1937, Roland had painted her like this. Her face is like the sun. That's appropriate. She had this searingly bright intellect and radiated warmth of personality. Earth is her legs. Air is her body. Fire is her warmth. But we see no water. Water is usually recognized as the allegory for emotion. And both Roland and Lee detested display of what they called sentimentality. After the war, Roland painted her like this. The colours are muted. Her body fragmented, and a large black spot occludes the brilliance of her face. Later still, he painted her like this. Her body is fragmented, broken up, washed up on a strange shore with a storm-filled sky. And his last portrait was in 1949. His once beautiful muse is now consumed by conflict. By now I had been born and I added to her troubles by giving her a massive dose of postnatal depression. You can see the anxiety and anger in her face and the impenetrable blackness that fills her body. The following lines are from a drama I wrote. It was titled Portrait of Space. And these are the words that came to me as a result of the studies I've made of Lee and her work, and of the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. I hope they express the state of mind that Lee was in. If you can imagine it, this is Lee's inner voice. When I close my eyes to sleep, there's blackness. Beautiful, serene blackness. And then behind my eyelids, the picture show begins unbidden and unstoppable. The faces of the dead piled like cordwood. The children dying in the Vienna hospital. The boys in the battlefield who knew somewhere along the line they sure as hell were gonna die. Their white faces when they are dead. At first, the pictures are silent. And then I hear the screaming shells and the explosions. I hear the screaming men, their cries tearing the frozen air. I hear the shallow breathing of the wounded who are not gonna make it through the night. Then I get the smell. The acrid smell of cordite, the smell of blood, the reek of decay, the stink of shit, the corrosive odor of mindless cruelty. Here in peaceful Hampstead, the tendrils of my war wrap themselves around my heart, lacerating like strands of barbed wire. Today we would understand her condition as being post-traumatic stress disorder, and there's a lot of work being done to understand it and to help people who are in that situation. But in 1949, the usual solution was called the stiff upper lip. You put up and you shut up. Aware that there were millions like you who'd suffered appalling trauma throughout the war. And it was not going to be you who let the side down by failing to cope, by blubbing all over the place. No, you carried on. There was no understanding, there was no cure, just whiskey, and Lee drank to try and blot out the memories. But no amount of whiskey could erase the indelible images seared into her retina. Rowland tried to help, but he couldn't reach in to calm her mind. How he wished he could have done something to ease her torment. She fought hard, but the odds were against her. In 1949, my parents bought a small farm in Sussex. It became her home. And Lee, as a mother, was a hazard. Some of you may know that growing up with an alcoholic parent is really difficult. Constant mood swings, absences from home, unpredictable behavior. And she was really remote. She was never violent, she didn't need to be, she could do all the damage she wanted with words. She was good with words. But luckily, Lee knew that she had no inclination or instinct to be a mother. And when I was four, this lady came into my life as my nanny, Patsy Murray, of Irish descent, and with the endless fund of love for all small creatures. She gave me the peace and the security I needed. She became my de facto mother, the grandmother to my children, the great-grandmother to theirs. She was in my life 57 years and four days. But my relationship with Lee deteriorated, and in my teenage years it became a form of warfare. We fought with incredible ferocity. But in the early 70s, I went overseas for three years. And when I returned, I was married to my late wife, Susanna. Susanna made a bridge between me and Lee. We crossed from opposite ends, met in the middle, and became friends. In the mid 60s, Lee had made the finest achievement of her life. Entirely with her own willpower. She got control of her drinking. She reinvented herself as a celebrity chef. She was featured in the pages of Vogue. And House and Gardens magazine. Surrealism hit the kitchen head on. We had dishes like blue spaghetti, green chicken, gold meatloaf, and pink cauliflower breasts. And it was a moment of great deliberation before I brought my girlfriends home for supper. Lee and Rowland finally found they could get on really well. It was only just in time for all of us, because Lee died in 1977 of pancreatic cancer, but she lived just long enough to meet our firstborn baby daughter. Amy, now 49 years on, is the very able CEO of the Lee Miller Archive. So what is it that qualifies so many of Lee's photographs as indelible images? That memorable quality of an image is subjective. You'll find some images stick in your mind more readily than others. Thinking back on the selection, you have seen some are shocking, some are subtle, some are quirky. But to allow you to respond, they first of all have to be made visible so you can see them. When Lee died, her work had become virtually invisible, and that's the way she wanted it. It's probable, like many people who suffer from PTSD, she didn't want those dreadful memories to be triggered by revisiting the images or other reminders. She refused to discuss her photographic career with anyone. She hid the entire body of her work up to the mid-50s in the attic of our old farmhouse, which is where Susanna discovered them about ten days after Lee had died. The boxes contained something like 60,000 negatives, manuscripts, letters, military orders, maps, luscious vintage prints. The brilliance of the work was immediately self-evident and represented a totally different picture to the one I had known of this person I had regarded as a useless drunk. I had to find out all I could about her, and the process of discovering the parent I never knew has filled my life ever since. Susanna, who was a ballet teacher, overnight became a photographic archivist and set about collating and archiving the images into a system where they're retrievable when we need them and available for researchers and curators. We also hold about 10,000 vintage prints. That's photos printed by Lee or others close to the time when they were taken, including Lee's original contract sheets as part of the holding. These are from the liberation of Dachau. We were joined by Carol Callow, who worked with us for more than 30 years. She became internationally known for the fine prints she made from Lee's original negatives using an enlarger and papers that were as close to Lee's originals as we could get. And she made many of the fine prints you can see on display at Tate Britain. In her time with us, Carol printed every single new silver gelatin print that's come out of the archive. And I believe that much of the success of Lee's work is currently due to the excellent standards that Carol consistently achieved. Early on, Thames and Hudson commissioned me to write the biography of Lee Miller. It was published in 1985 and it began the process of making Lee visible. More recently, 2007, Mark Hayworth Booth wrote this book, which is the catalogue for Lee Miller's centennial exhibition at the Victorian Albert Museum. It toured to Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Paris, and was seen by more than half a million visitors. It had been 80 years since Lee Miller had arrived in Paris to seduce Man Ray, and now she had returned to the heart of the city she loved. And for the last 25 years, we've had up to five headline shows a year in different countries. This is legendary Lee Miller in the Galleria Jacopic in Ljubljana, 2010. And I find it very satisfying to introduce Lee's work to such a broad selection of people. In 2015, we had a magnificent show at the Albertina in Vienna. Located in Albertina Platz, this beautiful piece of Baroque architecture looked very different when Lee visited it in 1945 after the Allied bombing had destroyed about one-third of the city. But by 2015, the Albertina was ready for its first ever photographic exhibition, and we were very honored they chose Lee. Lee is currently at Tate Britain with the largest ever retrospective of her work. It's taken us 49 years since Susanna discovered Lee's work in the attic to achieve this. And for me it's very satisfying and very personal because in 1960 I stood in these very same galleries watching my father install the first Picasso retrospective exhibition in this country. Lee had some exceptionally good reviews at the tape, very high attendance figures right from the first day. My little book is reprinted as a paperback, and it was the basis for making of the movie Lee, which was made and starred in by Kate Winslett. Kate's a very good look-alike for Lee, but she's also a good personality match because she has Lee's best qualities of endurance, of perception, of kindness, of very, very high intelligence. And she showed Lee's endurance for the horrors of the war and the harsh conditions of the battlefield. She also gives us an idea of Lee's intelligence and determination and compassion. Characteristics that I feel have contributed to making Lee's images indelible. Lee has been described as a photographer's film because the process of photography is at its core. Kate Winslett insisted on using her RoloFlex in such a way it became a personality in the movie, a fellow witness, and far more than just a prop. Kate was our main producer. Kate Solomon was also a producer. Our director was Ellen Curas, and many of the people, key people on the movie, were women. If you go see Lee and you find it has authenticity, remember it's a movie about a woman made by women. And for me, that's why it succeeds. Lee's old home at Farley Farmhouse has become a place of pilgrimage. And my daughter Amy helps to run the tours for our visitors who've come from all parts of the world. Lee's images have an enduring fascination for people from all walks of life. And of course, the historical content is of critical importance. And that leads us to why Lee's testimonial was important. Lee was an independent freelance photographer. She was known for her standing for peace and freedom and justice. And she was known for her uncompromising honesty. So why are indelible images important in a modern context? Will any of us ever forget 9-11? We need to remember conflict did not end with the war in 1945. These people are Palestinians, displaced from their lands by the formation of the State of Israel. Today we witness a genocide perpetrated against the Palestinians by the Israelis. A flood of indelible images reaches us every day. This image is by Jonathan Whittle. It shows a school inside Jabaliyyah. In the notes for this image, Jonathan Whittle tells us the bodies are partially eaten by dogs and cats. It seems conflict and the consequences of human suffering and refugees has always been and always will be with us. Nearly all the images we receive owe their origin to photography in one form or another, and of course to the photojournalists who take the pictures, often at huge personal risk and emotional cost. Niloufa Demir, the now famous Turkish woman photojournalist, took what will probably be regarded as one of the defining images of this century, of Alan Kurdy, the drowned toddler on a Turkish beach. The image became an international icon. Demir's compassion comes through so forcefully we can't help but be moved. It penetrated public indifference, ignited outrage about the thousands of fatalities among migrant refugees. And then the world moved on. But Demir's photo remains to remind us of our callous treatment of vulnerable people. And sometimes it's an amateur with a camera phone who delivers terrible and shaming truths, exposing injustice and abuse of power, as seen here in Abu Ghraib, and hopefully bringing accountability to the perpetrators. More than ever, these images are available to us, relentlessly accumulating on Google images, websites, social media. And so what are we to do with them? Particularly the ones that are indelible in our minds, well, that's up to us as individuals. And values like peace and freedom and justice are not a default setting. We need awareness in our lives to help us resist the forces that would like to drag us back from the progress we have made in religious and racial tolerance. We have to make our own choices, guided by our own principles. But I've treasured a touchstone as the words attributed to the 18th century politician Edmund Burke. For evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing. In 1997, my younger daughter Eliza, at the age of 18, visited Auschwitz. Lee never went there, but Eliza had grown up familiar with her grandmother's Holocaust images. She came back with this images and was disappointed in it. She said, I wanted to convey the sense of menace I felt by making a contrast with this carefree child skipping along those dreadful railway tracks. But all I got is a shot of a child. So she glued the photo to a board and expanded the seam with paint, adding the dead woman who's a Yugoslav partisan, murdered by the Nazis. Then Eliza got in the farm workshop, made the frame with the barbed wire, and then on the board below she added these words. From the poet George Santayana. Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it. Lee got it, sorry, Eliza got a very good mark in her GCSE exam. But best of all, a Holocaust survivor who visited the archives was really moved to see such a forceful work by one so young. I hope during this presentation you might feel you encountered my mum as well as some of her indelible images. I hope perhaps something of her spirit and her passion for peace and freedom and justice has come across to you. And if it sits well with you, please keep it. It's her gift and mine to you. And thank you for being such a wonderfully warm and friendly and supportive audience. It's been a tremendous pleasure to bring my mum here to meet you tonight. Thank you.