Lee Miller – A Life on the Front Line.

I have just watched this documentary film shown on BBC2, 2/5/2020.

Lee Miller was an extraordinary person and photographer, ahead of her time.  In a male dominated world she was able to stand out as a women, was the only female war photographer at the time, and yet retained her femininity throughout, having a number of affairs during her lifetime.

She started out as a model, appearing in American Vogue.  The story goes that she was discovered by Conde Naste as he scooped her up when she was almost run down by a car in New York.  Miller was used to be photographed as her father, Thoedore Miller, a keen amateur photographer, frequently took photographs of her, often in the nude.  Many of these were by today’s standards controversial, in what today would considered an inappropriate relationship between father and daughter.

It was photographer Edward Steichen who suggested she go to Paris to study photography with Man Ray  This resulted in Miller and Man Ray having an affair, but after a while because of Man Ray’s attempts at controlling her, the relationship broke down, her need for independence prevailed.

Miller then married an Egyptian businessman, and she moved to Egypt where she continued to take photographs. Despite the wealthy lifestyle she soon became disenchanted with life in Egypt.  Her husband offered to buy her a plane ticket to Paris so she could catch up with her old friends, but on the first evening in Paris she met an Englishman, Roland Penrose, and they started an affair.  She returned to Egypt but eventually returned to England to be with Penrose.  Before leaving Egypt her husband gave her a portfolio of shares so that she would never have to be dependent on anyone. He knew her need to be independent, a free spirit, so he provided the financial safety net, despite her leaving him for another man.

The next stage of her career was led by David Scherman, a war photographer, and he persuaded her to accompany him to Europe during the war.  Initially then went to St Malo.  This was a departure from fashion photography and she had  to learn to write text to accompany her photographs, something which she hadn’t done before.  Sherman and Miller visited Dachau Concentration Camp witnessing the liberation, before moving onto Munich.  She persuaded Vogue to publish a set of photographs, some showing horrific scenes of piles of bodies.

In Munich they visited Hitler’s home, and Scherman took the iconic photographs of Miller having a bath in Hitler’s bathroom, complete with her dirty boots on Hitler’s bathmat, a photograph of Hitler himself propped up next to Miller, and a look of defiance on Miller’s face. 

At the end of the war, Miller returned to Roland Penrose, but nothing was ever the same again.  Penrose had another women in his life and at this point, the independent  free spirited Miller changed.  She had seen so much, and returning to normal life was not possible.  She was lost, became an alcoholic, and suffered depression.  Penrose tried moving her out to the country, but the lack of contact with anyone made her suffering greater.

When she died, her son, Antony Penrose, who knew nothing of his mother’s life and only saw the alcoholic, started to research her life.  He discovered all her photographs boxed up and hidden in a loft.  Realising he only knew a tiny part of his mother, he started to unravel her life.  She had been raped at the age of 7, causing her to be infected with VD, and then photographed by her father starting shortly after her rape and continuing into her teenage year, mostly in the nude.  She had been told to keep the rape a secret, and perhaps she adopted that strategy for all her other activities, her affairs, the war photography.  We will never know, but we have her son to thank for showing us the true Lee Miller.

The work of Sophie Calle and Sophie Rickett both reflect postmodernist approaches to the narrative although their work is very different.  However, the one aspect of their work is similar: the use of images, text, videos, and other media.

In her project “Take Care of Yourself”, Sophie Calle takes a letter received from her boyfriend in which he “dumps” her, and offers it to 107 women asking them to analyse the content according to their personal and professional interests.  As a result the letter was converted into music, displayed complete with handwritten annotations, projected onto images of faces, acted out, converted into a crossword.  The whole was an unstructured but meaningful display which reflects the postmodern approach to art.  She recorded an interview, currently available on the Tate.org website, explaining how the project developed.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sophie-calle-2692/sophie-calle-dumped-email [accessed 3/4/2020]

Sophie Rickett developed her exhibition “Objects in the Field” following an encounter with a retired astronomer, Dr Roland Willstrop, while she was working at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge.  Dr Willstrop had previously developed a camera: The Three Mirror Telescope.  No longer in use, Rickett obtained a selection of now obsolete images, reprinted them herself, editing some in the process.  The result is a set of images and videos displayed in an unstructured way. The title of the exhibition, Objects in the Field refers to the atrological term for a light in the sky, object, and the sky itself, field.

The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia

I recently came across this book by David King in my local library.  In it, David King shows a number of photographs and works of art which were edited to remove those who had fallen out of favour in the Stalinist era in Russia.

The Preface to the book is written by Stephen F Cohen, Professor of Politics and Russian Studies at Princetown University, at the time of publishing in 1997.

Under Stalin’s regime, which ruled the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953, photographs lied.  In David King’s unique and revealing book, the same photographs, their original images restored, speak volumes of truth.

………Considering the five decades of official falsification and zealous concealment, David King’s book is heroic – the product of an immense, one-man archaeology.  His thirty-year unearthing of prefalsified Soviet photographs around the world has produced a legendary private collection …….

[Stephen F Cohen, New York, April 1997]

David King first became aware of this culture of falsifying photographs and art work, when in 1970, seventeen years after Stalin’s death, he visited the open sections of the photographic archives in Moscow.  When he asked about photographs showing Trotsky he generally received a reply:

“Why do you ask for Trotsky? Trotsky not important in Revolution.  Stalin Important.”

(King, 1997:12)

King said when he searched through the dark green metal storage boxes he discovered that although there were many mugshots in the section “T” there were none of Trotsky.

…They had completely wiped him out.  It was at this moment that I determined to start my collection.

(King, 1997:12)

During the following thirty years King created a collection of images showing the falsifications which took place during Stalin’s reign.  Some were airbrushed, some had parts of an image cut out, and in the case of artworks, had been recreated with a revised version in which some faces were removed or replaced.  In some cases a face has been blacked out and the book republished, as shown below.  (Presumably following the destruction of any previous versions of the book).

This book contains many more examples of images being edited to remove those who have fallen out of favour.  In the context of this unit, I see these images as an example of “photographs can lie”.  This is not a case of a quick update for aesthetic reasons, but for  reasons of power and control during a particularly corrupt period in Russian history.

I found this book to be a very moving collection of images and accompanying stories.  In my view David King has highlighted a serious issue which could easily be repeated in the future if corrupt power is able to take control in this way. Modern technology makes it easier, but the example of the Russian regime shows that technology as we know it today is not necessary if the desire is there to hide anything which is percieved to be in contravention of the State’s aim.

Bibliography

King, D. (1997) The commissar vanishes: The falsification of photographs and art in Stalin’s Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books.