Lee Miller Retrospective at the V&A
Nov. 25th, 2007 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningThe V&A has a large retrospective of the model and photographer Lee Miller, marking the centenary of her birth and thirty years since her death. I was familiar with her pictures – I went to a show of her work several years ago (in Amsterdam, I think), and found them captivating.
She had an interesting – and disturbing - life: she grew up being photographed by her father, and became a model; she moved to Paris where she sought out the surrealist photographer Man Ray and became his associate and lover. With Ray she helped develop some startling images, and discovered solarisation, producing startling, burnt-out images.
She moved back to the States, setting up her own studio in New York, before moving back to Europe, marrying (for a while) and travelling around Europe and the Middle East, all the while taking stunning images – seeing the surreal in the every day. Her eye for detail – caught in the exhibition in a series of pictures that only remain as contact images (the same size as the negative)– was immaculate.
Her most powerful images were taken in the second world war: the world gone mad, all she had to do was point the camera to catch her glimpses of the unreal. The horrors of her pictures from Buchenwald – piles of shoes; piles of bodies – are still resonant. There is a famous image of her bathing in Hitler’s bath after the fall of Berlin.
After the war, she remarried the art collector Roland Penrose (whose collection forms the basis for the Dean Gallery’s rich archive of surrealist pictures) and in the 1950s she stopped taking pictures; I read somewhere that her son Anthony Penrose was unaware of her body of work until her was sorting out her affairs following her death.
This was a brilliant show, capturing Miller’s influential vision: it was full of beautiful, compelling images, spanning fashion, portraiture, architecture – and war.
I have only one quibble: one of Miller’s most stunning, startling images wasn’t on show. Picturing bricks pouring through the door of a bombed out church, this photograph has a strong pull on my imagination.
The Lee Miller Archive contains many of the images from the exhibition, including the pictures I have linked to here.
She had an interesting – and disturbing - life: she grew up being photographed by her father, and became a model; she moved to Paris where she sought out the surrealist photographer Man Ray and became his associate and lover. With Ray she helped develop some startling images, and discovered solarisation, producing startling, burnt-out images.
She moved back to the States, setting up her own studio in New York, before moving back to Europe, marrying (for a while) and travelling around Europe and the Middle East, all the while taking stunning images – seeing the surreal in the every day. Her eye for detail – caught in the exhibition in a series of pictures that only remain as contact images (the same size as the negative)– was immaculate.
Portrait of Space - from the Daily Telegraph website.
Her most powerful images were taken in the second world war: the world gone mad, all she had to do was point the camera to catch her glimpses of the unreal. The horrors of her pictures from Buchenwald – piles of shoes; piles of bodies – are still resonant. There is a famous image of her bathing in Hitler’s bath after the fall of Berlin.
After the war, she remarried the art collector Roland Penrose (whose collection forms the basis for the Dean Gallery’s rich archive of surrealist pictures) and in the 1950s she stopped taking pictures; I read somewhere that her son Anthony Penrose was unaware of her body of work until her was sorting out her affairs following her death.
This was a brilliant show, capturing Miller’s influential vision: it was full of beautiful, compelling images, spanning fashion, portraiture, architecture – and war.
I have only one quibble: one of Miller’s most stunning, startling images wasn’t on show. Picturing bricks pouring through the door of a bombed out church, this photograph has a strong pull on my imagination.
Non-Conformist Chapel - from the Columbia University alumni magazine website.
The Lee Miller Archive contains many of the images from the exhibition, including the pictures I have linked to here.
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Date: 2007-11-25 07:20 pm (UTC)*browses gallery and becomes a bit giddy*
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Date: 2007-11-25 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 03:53 pm (UTC)Vaguely relevant: we've been watching the BBC Four 'The Genius of Photography' series. There have been lots of things that have had us making mental notes to read/research so it has been worthwhile, but overall it's had us yelling abuse at the screen. It wasn't until the 5th hour that any female photographers were mentioned, and there have only been about two exceptions to the American or moved-to-America theme. Lots of unexamined assumptions and value judgements too. But it has increased the desire we were both feeling to find a course on photography - not so much on taking photographs, but on the history of the art form - though we've not had much luck so far in tracking anything down.
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Date: 2007-11-29 08:55 pm (UTC)I haven't thought about gender and photography much until you mentioned it. I think of photogrpahy as being rather open - anyone can do it (especially now), and hence freeing up people to explroe their creative side in ways they might not have done.
Perhaps early in photography, it was dominated by chemists - hence men?
One of the things about the "Seduced" exhibition was how quickly photography produced pornography which would not have been out of place on the internet (except that the fashions were a hundred years old). Plus ca change!