WEBVTT
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Anthony will be delivering a lecture tonight on Lee Miller's indelible images.
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Welcome, Anthony Penrose.
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Thank you, Julian.
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Thank you very much.
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Thank you so much for coming out tonight on this wet evening.
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Indelible images.
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We are bombarded with images every minute of every day.
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They just come at us.
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Some are interesting, some are just rubbish.
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Images are important to us.
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Since the beginning of time, man and most other creatures on this planet rely on sight for survival.
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Images and the ability to interpret them and remember them for future reference, that's deeply ingrained in us.
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Movie makers tell us that 75% of the information we receive in a movie is visual.
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Some movie images have the power to haunt us, the indelible quality made more vivid by their ability to move.
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When you listen to a play on the radio, I expect you conjure up your own images to fit the story.
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But amid this blizzard of images that confront us every second of the day, what is it that distinguishes some of them?
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Do you hold on to them because they're intimately personal?
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For you, they're indelible.
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Because they connect to your memories of a treasured moment.
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Of course, you hold on to them.
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The tactile memory might fade over time, but the image itself will live with you as a surrogate memory.
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Some images have extreme aesthetic quality, a raw beauty that makes them lodge in your memory.
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Or perhaps there is something characterful about them that makes them stay in your mind.
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The most deeply indelible images have an assertion that overrides our will and fixes them forever in our minds.
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Many people, myself included, know there is no erase button for these images.
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They're traumatic for us and for the photographer who took them.
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They stay with us for the rest of our lives.
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This is my mum, Lee Miller.
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She knew a lot about images, and she knew a lot about the trauma of gathering them.
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She learned photography from her father, who had his own amateur dark room.
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He encouraged her to play rough and adventurous games with her brother from an early age.
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They grew up in a small upstate New York town called Poughkeepsie.
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When she was a teenager, she went to New York, entered art school, and one day she was walking along the pavement.
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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.
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And she did the girly thing.
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She fainted in his arms.
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Good choice, Lee, because the guy's name was Condé Nast.
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Owner of Vogue magazine and Vanity Fair, and within a few weeks she was front cover, Vogue March 1927.
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She was not yet 20 years old.
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This brought her to the attention of Edward Steichen, Vogue's chief photographer, and Steichen found she had the perfect looks for that period.
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And his photographs of her made her into what we would today call a supermodel.
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Coast to coast, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.
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But after about a year, maybe 18 months of all of this, Lee decided that she wanted to become a photographer.
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She had watched Steichen and those others who had photographed her, she'd watched them very carefully, and she wanted to become a photographer.
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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.
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She went and found him.
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She became immediately his lover, his pupil, his model, his studio assistant.
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And Man Ray was very generous and encouraged Lee with her photography.
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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.
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And she started cruising Montparnasse, taking pictures like this.
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I call them the found images because you know how fond of the found objects the Sierra Vists were.
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Well, these are found images.
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And she just snips them out of life and gives them back to us.
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She calls this exploding hand.
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Actually, this is the glass door to the Girland Perfume Shop.
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So many of the clientele have been wearing diamond rings that the diamonds have scratched that opaque area on the glass.
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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.
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And very often you'll find that she does just snip images out of life and give them back to us.
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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.
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Well, less than a year from arriving in Paris, Lee had her own studio going a few blocks away from Man Ray.
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And to save money, she started modeling for her own shots.
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And indeed, this was published Vogue in America, September 1930, together with another shot by Lee.
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Well, 1932, Lee decided to go back to New York.
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She and Man Ray were having a difficult time.
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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.
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And then she became the place to go for studio portraits.
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This lady is Mary Taylor.
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This is Lillian Harvey.
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These two women were actresses on Broadway.
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They wanted really commanding pictures to send to Hollywood casting directors.
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Two years on, 1933-34, a guy shows up.
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This man, Aziz Eloy Bey.
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He had met Lee in Paris years before, when Lee had photographed his wife.
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He had divorced his wife by now, and he rocked up in New York, and he asked Lee to marry him.
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And to everyone's shock and horror, she did.
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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.
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Aziz was very wealthy.
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There was not a thing that Lee could lack except mental stimulation.
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She so missed her friends in Paris.
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She missed the people around her, the buzz of the Cyrilis, the excitement.
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The most exciting thing her fellow expatriates could talk about was the cucumber sandwiches at the bridge party.
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Unsurprisingly, she grabbed her camera and she went off in the desert making long-range excursions.
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It was tough.
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The cars were only two-wheel drive, they kept on getting bogged down.
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There was no sat nav.
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They navigated using a sun compass across these trackless expanse of raw desert.
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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.
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She found her way across the desert to the oasis of Siwa.
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And on that journey took one of the most indelible of her images.
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She called it Portrait of Space.
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It was a little house built as a halfway point for King Fouad on his journey.
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So it had European windows with fly screens.
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But now the fly screen has broken.
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It's like she's waiting to burst through that hole, disappear off down the road.
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In the sky, is it a bird?
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Is it a cloud?
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You choose.
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And then there's that hatch.
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The hatch was there to put your hand through to close the storm shutters, but the flap has gone.
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It's just left us this portrait style frame.
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She calls it portrait of space.
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And that space is her gift to you for you to fill with your own dreams and your imaginings.
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Aziz knew how much Lee missed her friends in Paris.
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He gave her an airline ticket to Marseille.
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She boarded a train.
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She arrived in Paris, and the night she arrived, she went to this fantastic party.
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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.
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He was a British Surrealist artist, Roland Penrose.
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He would later become my dad, but he didn't know that at the time.
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He said meeting Lee for the first time was like being struck by lightning.
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It was love at first sight.
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They were inseparable for the rest of that summer.
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They went to the south of France to meet up with the old friends they had in common.
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On the left of the picture, that's Paul Eloir and his wife Noosh.
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On the right, in the hat, that's Man Ray.
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And the first serious girlfriend in his life, since Lee has left five years earlier, Adi Fidelin.
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Picasso was also there and he took a big interest in Lee.
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The following year, 1938, Lee and Roland met up in Athens and they made a long road trip through the Balkans to Romania.
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They knew the war was coming.
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They knew Romania had oil and the Nazis were likely to take it over.
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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.
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Already a level of persecution had begun.
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The authorities, partly out of fear of the Roma spreading typhoid, had forbidden them to move and to enter the markets.
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And this amounted to the end of their way of life, in many cases, ending their lives.
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For a nomadic culture, to stop moving is to start dying.
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Worse was to come.
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Roland could not live without Lee.
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In 1939, he went to Cairo.
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He met Aziz.
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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.
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He gave her freedom, he gave her his blessing, he gave her money, he gave her a steamship ticket to London.
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And she arrived eventually on the 3rd of September 1939.
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The day war was declared.
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To begin with, she worked from the Vogue Studios because a lot of the men had been called up for duty.
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And while she was taking pictures of the frocks and the handbags, the blitz was beginning.
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And it was as though this had been designed as something for Lee to photograph.
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She documented everything that was going wrong.
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In 1940, there were raids on 76 consecutive nights, except for one night, November the second, when inexplicably the Luftwaffe stayed home.
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And Lee caught it like this: one night of love.
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And that shows how humor can make an image indelible.
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And surrealism was always present in Lee.
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She called this exceptional achievement.
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And I think if you look at Mrs.
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Gander, Mrs.
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Goose there, she is saying to the gander, what are we going to feed it on when it hatches?
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And this poor little innocent tree in Charlotte Street is now an unexploded bomb.
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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.
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Sometimes Lee's fashion shots were a bit too challenging.
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This one was never used.
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In a way, it's a reaction to the triviality of fashion when other really serious things are happening in the street outside.
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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.
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And Lee knew that she would never be given a gun to shoot or a plane to fly.
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But she had her camera, and that became her weapon of choice.
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These are ATS women.
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They're operating a searchlight.
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Their work was highly dangerous because when the German bombers came over, they shot straight at the searchlight crews.
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743 of these women were killed, wounded, or missing in action.
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The Women's Royal Navy Service, the Wrens were mainly responsible for jobs like operating and maintaining and testing radios.
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Many of them were armorers.
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They did just about every non-combatant job there was.
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Incredibly skilled, incredibly responsible.
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Audrey and Lee wanted to show Britain the massive contribution the women were making to the war effort.
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This woman is a torpedo mechanic.
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If she or her mates get it wrong, there's enough explosives stacked around them to take the whole of Gossport off the map.
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The Normandy landings came on the 6th of June 1944.
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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.
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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.
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Lee covered all aspects of this amazing work and filed over 10,000 words and more than 40 rolls of film.
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It was published in Vogue September 1944, titled Unarmed Warriors.
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Her stories dominated Vogue features for the next year and a half.
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Her next overseas assignment became her first experience of combat.
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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.
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83rd Division.
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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.
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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.
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But then Lee witnessed a napalm strike.
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It was only the third time this weapon had been used.
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The burning liquid entered the ventilation shaft, sucking out all the oxygen and threatening to detonate the stores of ammunition.
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Colonel von Auchloch, a veteran of Stalingrad, had vowed to fight to the last man.
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But after the napalm strike, he wisely surrendered and Lee scooped that moment.
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And she found she had plenty of time to write her San Marlowe story because the U.S.
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Army put her under house arrest for violating the terms of her accreditation.
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But she got out in time to join the race for Paris and arrived during the Liberation.
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She described the streets filled with screaming, sheering, pretty people.
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She went to Picasso's studio.
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He nearly fell over backwards when he opened the door and found she was there.
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He hugged her, he kissed her all over, and then he stood back and he said, C'est incroyable.
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It's incredible.
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The first Allied soldier I should see is a woman, and she is you.
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I mean, not even his Picasso could get his head around that quickly.
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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.
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The Germans had their backs to their own frontier.
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They were fighting with incredible ferocity.
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Lee was there.
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She was there when the Allies punched into Germany at several fronts in the spring of 1945.
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Bonn.
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Hundreds of people died in a direct hit on an air raid shelter here.
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Cologne, the oldest cathedral in Europe, nearly reduced to rubble.
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We can get a hint of the anger driving Lee forward in this moment.
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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.
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Lee's caption for this image hit me hard.
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She wrote, This is a good German.
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He's dead.
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I thought, how can you look into the face of a teenage boy and be glad he's dead?
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Frankfurt, the roof of the Festhaler transformed into the giant spider's web.
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Ludwigshaven, the Allied bombing had destroyed the vast chemical plants.
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Lee noted that whole streets were dyed bright colours by the spilled chemicals.
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When you spot the soldier there, you get an idea of the scale of that place.
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Nuremberg, the ancient city, founded in 1050.
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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.
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In Leipzig, Lee encountered some deaths she did not mourn.
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Kurt Lisso, the city treasurer, his wife, and his daughter, and some of the military people, had killed themselves.
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They had thought it was the Russians attacking the city.
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It was a very bad idea to be captured by the Russians if you were a Nazi official.
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It was an even worse idea to be captured by the Russians if you were a Nazi woman.
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So they all crunched their cyanide capsules and died.
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Lee visited four concentration camps inside Germany.
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Odurf, Pennink, Buchenwald, and Dachau.
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This is the gates of Buchenwald.
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The sign translates colloquially as you get what you deserve.
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How could anyone deserve this?
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Li arrived in Dachau on the 30th of April.
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It was the first day of its freedom.
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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.
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These prisoners, mainly Dutch, are seen singing their national anthem.
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They were relatively new arrivals in the camp.
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Most others were not in such good shape.
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Some of these images are from Buchenwald, some are from Dachau.
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The exact location makes little difference.
00:21:02.319 --> 00:21:14.000
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.
00:21:14.559 --> 00:21:17.359
Lee's wartime buddy, David E.
00:21:17.759 --> 00:21:19.519
Scherman, was with her.
00:21:19.920 --> 00:21:25.599
He told me she was encased in ice cold rage.
00:21:26.240 --> 00:21:29.680
By now the war was very, very personal to Lee.
00:21:29.920 --> 00:21:33.440
When she arrived in Paris, so many of her friends were missing.
00:21:33.599 --> 00:21:35.839
No one knew what their fate had been.
00:21:36.079 --> 00:21:39.279
Now she knew and she would never forgive.
00:21:40.079 --> 00:21:47.279
In Dachau, in a street beside the camp, they found a train halted outside the gates.
00:21:47.519 --> 00:21:53.599
It had left Buchenwald 30 days earlier, loaded with 3,102 prisoners.
00:21:53.759 --> 00:21:56.960
The GIs found one survivor.
00:21:57.279 --> 00:21:59.279
The rest had died of starvation.
00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:00.960
They died of thirst.
00:22:01.039 --> 00:22:02.079
They died of exposure.
00:22:02.160 --> 00:22:03.200
They died of disease.
00:22:03.359 --> 00:22:08.880
Some had been beaten to death, others had been shot, and in every single case it was murder.
00:22:09.039 --> 00:22:12.400
They were all unarmed civilian prisoners.
00:22:13.279 --> 00:22:25.200
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.
00:22:25.680 --> 00:22:38.799
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.
00:22:39.039 --> 00:22:51.039
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.
00:22:51.839 --> 00:22:59.759
So that the wagon that makes the rounds every day can pick them up like just so much garbage.
00:23:01.359 --> 00:23:04.799
The bodies were piled in heaps outside the crematorium.
00:23:04.960 --> 00:23:08.319
The furnaces had run out of coal five days earlier.
00:23:08.559 --> 00:23:11.599
So there was no hiding the evidence.
00:23:11.920 --> 00:23:21.839
Many prisoners wandered helplessly and uncomprehending, endlessly scavenging the rubbish heaps for clothing, or the greatest prize of all, a scrap of food.
00:23:22.160 --> 00:23:27.440
Some of the guards had put on civilian clothing, but the prisoners recognized them and beat them mercilessly.
00:23:27.519 --> 00:23:30.880
The GIs put them in their own jails for their protection.
00:23:31.119 --> 00:23:34.880
One guard killed himself, he hung himself sitting down.
00:23:35.200 --> 00:23:40.079
And this man, Klaus Horningck, remained defiant to the end.
00:23:40.240 --> 00:23:49.759
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.
00:23:51.440 --> 00:23:58.720
British Vogue published very few of Lee's words and her pictures, but American Vogue ran many images.
00:23:58.960 --> 00:24:00.960
The headline reads, Believe it.
00:24:01.279 --> 00:24:08.880
Lee had cabled to Audrey Withers the words, I implore you to believe this is true.
00:24:09.519 --> 00:24:17.440
She was aware that people were already denying the Holocaust and she wanted her evidence as a witness to be made known.
00:24:18.559 --> 00:24:26.480
We have to ask, if we're going to be objective, how reliable was Lee Miller as a witness?
00:24:27.519 --> 00:24:34.319
I've studied the US Army records and the official histories produced by Dachau KZ and Buchenweld KZ Museums.
00:24:34.559 --> 00:24:39.039
They accurately support the facts behind Lee's photographs and her writings.
00:24:39.200 --> 00:24:41.119
But there's something else.
00:24:43.519 --> 00:24:45.359
There were other witnesses.
00:24:46.079 --> 00:24:48.400
This is the already mentioned David E.
00:24:48.559 --> 00:24:52.559
Sherman, a very distinguished Life magazine combat photographer.
00:24:52.799 --> 00:24:57.039
Sherman and Lee met as two Yanks in Britain in early 1943.
00:24:57.119 --> 00:25:07.440
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.
00:25:08.079 --> 00:25:19.759
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.
00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:22.319
And although initially assigned to the U.S.
00:25:22.480 --> 00:25:31.680
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.
00:25:32.480 --> 00:25:34.960
I met Sherman in 1976.
00:25:35.599 --> 00:25:40.720
After my mum died, he became indispensable in setting up the Lee Miller archives.
00:25:40.799 --> 00:25:43.039
I spent weeks in his American home.
00:25:43.200 --> 00:25:52.000
He gave me hundreds of hours of interview with incredible attention for accuracy, for dates, places, people's names.
00:25:52.559 --> 00:25:57.200
I could never have written my biography, The Lives of Lee Miller, without him.
00:25:57.599 --> 00:26:00.640
He wrote the foreword for Lee Miller's war.
00:26:01.119 --> 00:26:03.200
Sherman was unimpeachable.
00:26:03.440 --> 00:26:06.160
He was there for most of Lee's war.
00:26:06.559 --> 00:26:08.880
He absolutely corroborated her evidence.
00:26:08.960 --> 00:26:16.559
It was he who described Lee Miller as being fiercely intolerant of sham, and he valued her honesty above all.
00:26:17.839 --> 00:26:20.960
I've had the privilege of connecting with other witnesses.
00:26:21.200 --> 00:26:27.680
In December 2007, this lady, Marianne Sweeney, came to visit me at the Lee Miller Archive.
00:26:27.920 --> 00:26:33.119
She was researching the history of her father who had died when she was five years old.
00:26:33.359 --> 00:26:37.759
Captain Joseph Bernard Sweeney served as a surgeon in the U.S.
00:26:37.920 --> 00:26:41.519
Army for four years and was awarded the Bronze Star.
00:26:42.240 --> 00:26:46.799
He had been one of those surgeons in the Brickville Evacuation Hospital.
00:26:47.039 --> 00:26:48.640
We searched the files.
00:26:48.720 --> 00:26:50.559
But most of the doctors were masked.
00:26:50.640 --> 00:26:51.680
It was so frustrating.
00:26:51.759 --> 00:27:00.559
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.
00:27:01.359 --> 00:27:07.519
Then Marianne showed me this shot her father had taken on his own camera, and I knew we had a match.
00:27:07.920 --> 00:27:14.559
The frame of his picture is a rectangular format, and it has a different focal length to Lee's.
00:27:14.799 --> 00:27:29.119
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.
00:27:29.359 --> 00:27:37.519
Captain Sweeney's next picture shows he went round the other side of the rail car and photographed through the newly opened door.
00:27:38.799 --> 00:27:43.279
So was Captain Sweeney in the photograph by Lee Miller.
00:27:43.680 --> 00:27:50.480
The soldier on the right is wearing a uniform and carrying a sidearm, a pistol, that is, that suggests he was an officer.
00:27:50.720 --> 00:27:52.640
Was he Captain Sweeney?
00:27:53.279 --> 00:27:58.960
Could the soldier on the left walking away be Captain Sweeney just after he's taken his picture?
00:27:59.680 --> 00:28:02.960
Marianne had two other photos taken by her father.
00:28:03.279 --> 00:28:07.680
This one taken further along the train, and this one.
00:28:08.480 --> 00:28:14.400
And then I realized it was a chilling familiarity.
00:28:15.119 --> 00:28:19.599
It's the reverse angle of this photograph by Lee Miller.
00:28:20.160 --> 00:28:30.079
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.
00:28:30.400 --> 00:28:35.119
It is possible to find where the photographer was standing when the picture was taken.
00:28:35.279 --> 00:28:45.680
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.
00:28:46.079 --> 00:28:53.039
Seen here adjusting what looks like a folding Kodak, that camera would be consistent with the format of his negatives.
00:28:53.279 --> 00:29:06.400
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.
00:29:08.000 --> 00:29:09.680
The story didn't end there.
00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:13.200
Five years later, Marianne sent me this shot.
00:29:13.440 --> 00:29:16.960
Do you remember I told you the GIs found one survivor?
00:29:17.200 --> 00:29:22.400
Well, one of the soldiers who found the survivor was Captain Sweeney.
00:29:24.160 --> 00:29:30.000
Both our parents had suffered badly with post-traumatic stress in the years after the war.
00:29:30.400 --> 00:29:35.920
Neither had ever spoken about the extraordinary things they'd witnessed and the heroic things they'd done.
00:29:36.240 --> 00:29:43.039
And looking back on their eyewitness photographs, can there be any real doubt about the authenticity of these images?
00:29:43.200 --> 00:29:45.279
If there is, bring it on.
00:29:45.440 --> 00:29:46.559
I want to hear it.
00:29:46.720 --> 00:29:55.200
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.
00:29:56.559 --> 00:30:07.200
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.
00:30:07.440 --> 00:30:11.759
Sorry, they drove about 30 kilometers down the road from Dachau to Munich.
00:30:11.920 --> 00:30:18.640
And they were invited by the Signal Corps to share a luxurious billet in Hitler's apartment.
00:30:18.960 --> 00:30:23.279
It was probably the only building in Munich to have coal.
00:30:23.519 --> 00:30:26.480
So it had hot water in the tub.
00:30:27.599 --> 00:30:32.160
Lee hops in first, and they set the shot up.
00:30:32.480 --> 00:30:39.359
The photo on the edge of the tub is a picture by Hitler's revolting personal photographer called Heinrich Hoffmann.
00:30:39.519 --> 00:30:49.440
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.
00:30:49.920 --> 00:30:56.640
It reads Einvolk, Einleich, Ein Fuhrer, Gross Deutschland.
00:30:57.519 --> 00:31:05.039
One race, one nation, one leader, great Germany.
00:31:05.279 --> 00:31:11.920
You can imagine how I feel when certain international leaders start talking about making something great again.
00:31:12.160 --> 00:31:14.960
Doesn't anybody remember what happened last time?
00:31:15.200 --> 00:31:19.039
Anyway, it's not the photograph that's the key to this.
00:31:20.079 --> 00:31:21.359
It's the boots.
00:31:21.599 --> 00:31:36.480
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.
00:31:36.880 --> 00:31:39.200
She's not sitting there as a guest.
00:31:39.440 --> 00:31:44.960
She's a victor, metaphorically grinding her heel into Hitler's face.
00:31:45.279 --> 00:31:51.440
And she dried herself on his lemon yellow bath towel with its AH monogram.
00:31:52.079 --> 00:31:53.920
And there's something else.
00:31:54.240 --> 00:32:06.960
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.
00:32:07.359 --> 00:32:20.160
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.
00:32:20.400 --> 00:32:23.200
The retreating troopers had set fire to it.
00:32:24.319 --> 00:32:31.359
I visited the site in 2005 with a couple of German historians who were making a radio program about Lee.
00:32:31.519 --> 00:32:35.599
I stood in the same place where Lee stood to get this picture.
00:32:35.839 --> 00:32:40.079
At this point, Lee and Sherman were unsupported in enemy territory.
00:32:40.240 --> 00:32:43.839
They were actually three miles ahead of the front line of the army.
00:32:44.000 --> 00:32:53.519
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.
00:32:54.400 --> 00:33:01.359
I stood there sixty years and ten days later, the same time of day, the same weather.
00:33:01.680 --> 00:33:07.839
Not a trace of Hitler remained except for a little wooden peg right here.
00:33:08.160 --> 00:33:20.079
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.
00:33:20.960 --> 00:33:37.440
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.
00:33:37.759 --> 00:33:43.279
Justifiable reason to crack open the bottle of champagne they'd looted from Hitler's cellar.
00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:47.039
A few days later, the war was over.
00:33:47.440 --> 00:33:50.400
Sherman was recalled by Life magazine.
00:33:51.680 --> 00:33:55.119
He turned west, back to Paris, London, and New York.
00:33:55.279 --> 00:33:58.960
Lee turned east to follow the GIs into Austria and Hungary.
00:33:59.119 --> 00:34:11.039
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.
00:34:11.440 --> 00:34:14.559
There was no sign of the brave new world.
00:34:14.719 --> 00:34:17.519
Everyone in the free world had fought for it.
00:34:17.760 --> 00:34:22.800
She felt that the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians had died for nothing.
00:34:22.960 --> 00:34:28.079
She felt the desolation of the countless refugees trying to reach their homes.
00:34:28.400 --> 00:34:30.000
She reached Vienna.
00:34:30.480 --> 00:34:35.920
The fighting had been intense as the Russians and the Americans simultaneously advanced on the city.
00:34:36.079 --> 00:34:39.679
Today the city bears no trace of the conflict.
00:34:40.239 --> 00:34:44.480
But then it was wrecked by Allied bombs and the fires that followed.
00:34:44.639 --> 00:34:44.800
St.
00:34:44.960 --> 00:34:48.960
Stephen's Cathedral had been badly damaged and lost most of its roof.
00:34:49.280 --> 00:34:59.760
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.
00:35:00.159 --> 00:35:09.760
Lee photographed Ermgard Siefried singing an aria from Madame Butterfly on the stage, accompanied by the contrapuntal crash of falling masonry.
00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:15.440
It was symbolic of the triumph of culture and beauty over destruction.
00:35:16.559 --> 00:35:20.960
But she found few triumphs in the Vilhelmina Children's Hospital.
00:35:21.119 --> 00:35:27.199
The black marketeers had stolen all the drugs, exactly as was portrayed in the movie The Third Man.
00:35:27.840 --> 00:35:32.559
She wrote in a dispatch that unsurprisingly was never published in vogue.
00:35:33.840 --> 00:35:37.119
For an hour I watched a baby die.
00:35:37.840 --> 00:35:40.639
He was dark blue when I first saw him.
00:35:40.880 --> 00:35:52.480
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.
00:35:52.880 --> 00:35:57.679
I'd thought all babies looked alike, but that was healthy babies.
00:35:57.920 --> 00:35:59.760
There are many faces for the dying.
00:35:59.920 --> 00:36:01.599
This wasn't a two-month baby.
00:36:01.679 --> 00:36:03.599
He was a skinny gladiator.
00:36:03.760 --> 00:36:10.079
He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched.
00:36:10.239 --> 00:36:23.280
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.
00:36:23.440 --> 00:36:27.440
There was nothing to do but watch him die.
00:36:28.960 --> 00:36:33.920
This tiny baby fought for his only possession, life.
00:36:34.239 --> 00:36:36.320
As if it might be worth something.
00:36:36.880 --> 00:36:45.360
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.
00:36:48.239 --> 00:36:49.840
Lee got through to Budapest.
00:36:50.880 --> 00:36:54.960
It seems hunger, poverty, and endless suffering were everywhere she went.
00:36:55.039 --> 00:36:57.920
There was still no sign of that brave new world.
00:36:58.239 --> 00:37:00.800
Her disillusionment was intense.
00:37:01.119 --> 00:37:07.760
She witnessed the execution of Laszlo Bardoshi, the fascist ex-prime minister of Hungary.
00:37:07.920 --> 00:37:14.639
Not even killing fascists brought Lee any relief from the intensely bitter disillusionment that had settled on her.
00:37:14.880 --> 00:37:16.800
She went on into Romania.
00:37:16.960 --> 00:37:23.760
She found the Roma and Sinti people she had photographed before the war had mostly been murdered by the fascists.
00:37:24.079 --> 00:37:26.960
By now, she was utterly exhausted.
00:37:27.119 --> 00:37:28.159
She was ill.
00:37:28.320 --> 00:37:31.199
She was drained of the will to carry on.
00:37:31.840 --> 00:37:37.199
Roland had written her endless letters imploring her to come home, but she didn't answer him.
00:37:37.519 --> 00:37:42.320
It was only occasional news from Audrey Withers at Vogue that told him where she was.
00:37:42.800 --> 00:37:46.000
And then Sherman sent her a telegram.
00:37:46.239 --> 00:37:49.679
It simply said, Go home.
00:37:50.480 --> 00:37:52.000
Lee cable back.
00:37:52.960 --> 00:37:53.280
Okay.
00:37:54.880 --> 00:37:56.480
Roland met her in Paris.
00:37:56.639 --> 00:37:57.599
He was horrified.
00:37:57.679 --> 00:37:59.679
She was so beaten down.
00:38:00.239 --> 00:38:01.199
So ill.
00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:04.239
So destroyed almost.
00:38:04.480 --> 00:38:09.440
He gently brought her home to London and she had become a very different person.
00:38:09.679 --> 00:38:11.519
She had changed so much.
00:38:12.079 --> 00:38:16.239
Soon after he met her in 1937, Roland had painted her like this.
00:38:16.400 --> 00:38:17.760
Her face is like the sun.
00:38:17.920 --> 00:38:18.800
That's appropriate.
00:38:18.880 --> 00:38:23.599
She had this searingly bright intellect and radiated warmth of personality.
00:38:24.079 --> 00:38:25.519
Earth is her legs.
00:38:25.760 --> 00:38:27.039
Air is her body.
00:38:27.360 --> 00:38:28.880
Fire is her warmth.
00:38:29.119 --> 00:38:30.880
But we see no water.
00:38:31.199 --> 00:38:35.360
Water is usually recognized as the allegory for emotion.
00:38:35.920 --> 00:38:42.079
And both Roland and Lee detested display of what they called sentimentality.
00:38:42.559 --> 00:38:45.519
After the war, Roland painted her like this.
00:38:45.840 --> 00:38:47.280
The colours are muted.
00:38:47.440 --> 00:38:54.559
Her body fragmented, and a large black spot occludes the brilliance of her face.
00:38:54.800 --> 00:38:56.480
Later still, he painted her like this.
00:38:56.639 --> 00:39:03.519
Her body is fragmented, broken up, washed up on a strange shore with a storm-filled sky.
00:39:03.679 --> 00:39:06.639
And his last portrait was in 1949.
00:39:07.039 --> 00:39:11.039
His once beautiful muse is now consumed by conflict.
00:39:11.199 --> 00:39:16.880
By now I had been born and I added to her troubles by giving her a massive dose of postnatal depression.
00:39:17.119 --> 00:39:23.519
You can see the anxiety and anger in her face and the impenetrable blackness that fills her body.
00:39:24.719 --> 00:39:27.360
The following lines are from a drama I wrote.
00:39:27.519 --> 00:39:30.239
It was titled Portrait of Space.
00:39:30.480 --> 00:39:39.280
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.
00:39:39.599 --> 00:39:43.840
I hope they express the state of mind that Lee was in.
00:39:44.079 --> 00:39:48.480
If you can imagine it, this is Lee's inner voice.
00:39:50.800 --> 00:39:55.360
When I close my eyes to sleep, there's blackness.
00:39:55.920 --> 00:39:58.719
Beautiful, serene blackness.
00:39:58.880 --> 00:40:04.880
And then behind my eyelids, the picture show begins unbidden and unstoppable.
00:40:05.440 --> 00:40:09.119
The faces of the dead piled like cordwood.
00:40:10.480 --> 00:40:14.000
The children dying in the Vienna hospital.
00:40:14.320 --> 00:40:20.480
The boys in the battlefield who knew somewhere along the line they sure as hell were gonna die.
00:40:21.039 --> 00:40:24.000
Their white faces when they are dead.
00:40:24.800 --> 00:40:27.920
At first, the pictures are silent.
00:40:28.480 --> 00:40:32.000
And then I hear the screaming shells and the explosions.
00:40:32.159 --> 00:40:36.000
I hear the screaming men, their cries tearing the frozen air.
00:40:36.239 --> 00:40:40.559
I hear the shallow breathing of the wounded who are not gonna make it through the night.
00:40:40.800 --> 00:40:42.480
Then I get the smell.
00:40:43.119 --> 00:40:52.559
The acrid smell of cordite, the smell of blood, the reek of decay, the stink of shit, the corrosive odor of mindless cruelty.
00:40:53.119 --> 00:41:04.159
Here in peaceful Hampstead, the tendrils of my war wrap themselves around my heart, lacerating like strands of barbed wire.
00:41:08.400 --> 00:41:19.039
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.
00:41:19.280 --> 00:41:23.760
But in 1949, the usual solution was called the stiff upper lip.
00:41:24.079 --> 00:41:26.639
You put up and you shut up.
00:41:26.880 --> 00:41:31.679
Aware that there were millions like you who'd suffered appalling trauma throughout the war.
00:41:31.840 --> 00:41:38.480
And it was not going to be you who let the side down by failing to cope, by blubbing all over the place.
00:41:38.639 --> 00:41:40.239
No, you carried on.
00:41:40.480 --> 00:41:47.119
There was no understanding, there was no cure, just whiskey, and Lee drank to try and blot out the memories.
00:41:47.360 --> 00:41:53.039
But no amount of whiskey could erase the indelible images seared into her retina.
00:41:53.760 --> 00:41:58.559
Rowland tried to help, but he couldn't reach in to calm her mind.
00:41:58.800 --> 00:42:02.320
How he wished he could have done something to ease her torment.
00:42:02.480 --> 00:42:05.599
She fought hard, but the odds were against her.
00:42:06.320 --> 00:42:10.239
In 1949, my parents bought a small farm in Sussex.
00:42:10.320 --> 00:42:11.840
It became her home.
00:42:12.400 --> 00:42:16.159
And Lee, as a mother, was a hazard.
00:42:16.880 --> 00:42:21.280
Some of you may know that growing up with an alcoholic parent is really difficult.
00:42:21.519 --> 00:42:26.800
Constant mood swings, absences from home, unpredictable behavior.
00:42:27.360 --> 00:42:29.360
And she was really remote.
00:42:29.599 --> 00:42:35.760
She was never violent, she didn't need to be, she could do all the damage she wanted with words.
00:42:36.239 --> 00:42:38.559
She was good with words.
00:42:39.199 --> 00:42:43.840
But luckily, Lee knew that she had no inclination or instinct to be a mother.
00:42:44.000 --> 00:42:55.519
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.
00:42:55.760 --> 00:42:58.960
She gave me the peace and the security I needed.
00:42:59.119 --> 00:43:04.000
She became my de facto mother, the grandmother to my children, the great-grandmother to theirs.
00:43:04.159 --> 00:43:08.960
She was in my life 57 years and four days.
00:43:09.199 --> 00:43:16.000
But my relationship with Lee deteriorated, and in my teenage years it became a form of warfare.
00:43:16.239 --> 00:43:18.960
We fought with incredible ferocity.
00:43:19.519 --> 00:43:23.679
But in the early 70s, I went overseas for three years.
00:43:23.920 --> 00:43:29.280
And when I returned, I was married to my late wife, Susanna.
00:43:29.840 --> 00:43:34.000
Susanna made a bridge between me and Lee.
00:43:35.199 --> 00:43:41.840
We crossed from opposite ends, met in the middle, and became friends.
00:43:43.039 --> 00:43:48.320
In the mid 60s, Lee had made the finest achievement of her life.
00:43:48.559 --> 00:43:50.719
Entirely with her own willpower.
00:43:51.039 --> 00:43:53.760
She got control of her drinking.
00:43:54.159 --> 00:43:57.679
She reinvented herself as a celebrity chef.
00:43:57.840 --> 00:43:59.840
She was featured in the pages of Vogue.
00:44:00.239 --> 00:44:02.320
And House and Gardens magazine.
00:44:02.639 --> 00:44:05.039
Surrealism hit the kitchen head on.
00:44:05.199 --> 00:44:11.280
We had dishes like blue spaghetti, green chicken, gold meatloaf, and pink cauliflower breasts.
00:44:11.360 --> 00:44:16.000
And it was a moment of great deliberation before I brought my girlfriends home for supper.
00:44:18.559 --> 00:44:22.800
Lee and Rowland finally found they could get on really well.
00:44:23.440 --> 00:44:34.239
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.
00:44:34.880 --> 00:44:42.320
Amy, now 49 years on, is the very able CEO of the Lee Miller Archive.
00:44:43.199 --> 00:44:48.000
So what is it that qualifies so many of Lee's photographs as indelible images?
00:44:48.159 --> 00:44:52.239
That memorable quality of an image is subjective.
00:44:52.480 --> 00:44:56.320
You'll find some images stick in your mind more readily than others.
00:44:56.639 --> 00:45:03.920
Thinking back on the selection, you have seen some are shocking, some are subtle, some are quirky.
00:45:04.480 --> 00:45:11.599
But to allow you to respond, they first of all have to be made visible so you can see them.
00:45:13.360 --> 00:45:18.960
When Lee died, her work had become virtually invisible, and that's the way she wanted it.
00:45:19.199 --> 00:45:27.199
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.
00:45:27.440 --> 00:45:30.480
She refused to discuss her photographic career with anyone.
00:45:30.639 --> 00:45:41.760
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.
00:45:41.920 --> 00:45:49.599
The boxes contained something like 60,000 negatives, manuscripts, letters, military orders, maps, luscious vintage prints.
00:45:49.760 --> 00:46:01.119
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.
00:46:01.519 --> 00:46:08.639
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.
00:46:08.880 --> 00:46:22.960
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.
00:46:23.280 --> 00:46:26.480
We also hold about 10,000 vintage prints.
00:46:26.639 --> 00:46:36.480
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.
00:46:36.800 --> 00:46:39.599
These are from the liberation of Dachau.
00:46:40.079 --> 00:46:44.159
We were joined by Carol Callow, who worked with us for more than 30 years.
00:46:44.320 --> 00:46:54.320
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.
00:46:54.480 --> 00:46:59.199
And she made many of the fine prints you can see on display at Tate Britain.
00:46:59.599 --> 00:47:06.239
In her time with us, Carol printed every single new silver gelatin print that's come out of the archive.
00:47:06.400 --> 00:47:14.960
And I believe that much of the success of Lee's work is currently due to the excellent standards that Carol consistently achieved.
00:47:15.519 --> 00:47:19.599
Early on, Thames and Hudson commissioned me to write the biography of Lee Miller.
00:47:19.920 --> 00:47:25.119
It was published in 1985 and it began the process of making Lee visible.
00:47:25.440 --> 00:47:36.239
More recently, 2007, Mark Hayworth Booth wrote this book, which is the catalogue for Lee Miller's centennial exhibition at the Victorian Albert Museum.
00:47:36.400 --> 00:47:44.320
It toured to Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Paris, and was seen by more than half a million visitors.
00:47:44.639 --> 00:47:53.679
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.
00:47:53.920 --> 00:47:59.039
And for the last 25 years, we've had up to five headline shows a year in different countries.
00:47:59.199 --> 00:48:04.960
This is legendary Lee Miller in the Galleria Jacopic in Ljubljana, 2010.
00:48:05.119 --> 00:48:10.320
And I find it very satisfying to introduce Lee's work to such a broad selection of people.
00:48:10.639 --> 00:48:15.519
In 2015, we had a magnificent show at the Albertina in Vienna.
00:48:15.760 --> 00:48:28.400
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.
00:48:28.639 --> 00:48:36.880
But by 2015, the Albertina was ready for its first ever photographic exhibition, and we were very honored they chose Lee.
00:48:37.280 --> 00:48:41.760
Lee is currently at Tate Britain with the largest ever retrospective of her work.
00:48:42.159 --> 00:48:48.079
It's taken us 49 years since Susanna discovered Lee's work in the attic to achieve this.
00:48:48.239 --> 00:49:01.760
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.
00:49:02.400 --> 00:49:09.519
Lee had some exceptionally good reviews at the tape, very high attendance figures right from the first day.
00:49:10.480 --> 00:49:24.320
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.
00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:36.800
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.
00:49:37.039 --> 00:49:43.199
And she showed Lee's endurance for the horrors of the war and the harsh conditions of the battlefield.
00:49:43.599 --> 00:49:48.320
She also gives us an idea of Lee's intelligence and determination and compassion.
00:49:48.719 --> 00:49:54.719
Characteristics that I feel have contributed to making Lee's images indelible.
00:49:56.559 --> 00:50:04.239
Lee has been described as a photographer's film because the process of photography is at its core.
00:50:04.480 --> 00:50:13.199
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.
00:50:14.320 --> 00:50:15.920
Kate was our main producer.
00:50:16.079 --> 00:50:18.480
Kate Solomon was also a producer.
00:50:18.719 --> 00:50:25.199
Our director was Ellen Curas, and many of the people, key people on the movie, were women.
00:50:25.440 --> 00:50:34.559
If you go see Lee and you find it has authenticity, remember it's a movie about a woman made by women.
00:50:34.719 --> 00:50:37.440
And for me, that's why it succeeds.
00:50:38.239 --> 00:50:42.480
Lee's old home at Farley Farmhouse has become a place of pilgrimage.
00:50:42.559 --> 00:50:47.679
And my daughter Amy helps to run the tours for our visitors who've come from all parts of the world.
00:50:47.840 --> 00:50:53.039
Lee's images have an enduring fascination for people from all walks of life.
00:50:53.199 --> 00:50:57.599
And of course, the historical content is of critical importance.
00:50:57.920 --> 00:51:02.239
And that leads us to why Lee's testimonial was important.
00:51:03.280 --> 00:51:07.599
Lee was an independent freelance photographer.
00:51:07.920 --> 00:51:13.280
She was known for her standing for peace and freedom and justice.
00:51:13.519 --> 00:51:17.760
And she was known for her uncompromising honesty.
00:51:20.480 --> 00:51:25.840
So why are indelible images important in a modern context?
00:51:26.400 --> 00:51:29.039
Will any of us ever forget 9-11?
00:51:30.079 --> 00:51:34.239
We need to remember conflict did not end with the war in 1945.
00:51:34.320 --> 00:51:40.480
These people are Palestinians, displaced from their lands by the formation of the State of Israel.
00:51:40.719 --> 00:51:45.679
Today we witness a genocide perpetrated against the Palestinians by the Israelis.
00:51:46.000 --> 00:51:49.199
A flood of indelible images reaches us every day.
00:51:49.360 --> 00:51:51.440
This image is by Jonathan Whittle.
00:51:51.760 --> 00:51:55.679
It shows a school inside Jabaliyyah.
00:51:56.400 --> 00:52:04.400
In the notes for this image, Jonathan Whittle tells us the bodies are partially eaten by dogs and cats.
00:52:07.360 --> 00:52:15.599
It seems conflict and the consequences of human suffering and refugees has always been and always will be with us.
00:52:15.760 --> 00:52:27.280
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.
00:52:27.920 --> 00:52:42.719
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.
00:52:42.960 --> 00:52:45.599
The image became an international icon.
00:52:45.840 --> 00:52:51.039
Demir's compassion comes through so forcefully we can't help but be moved.
00:52:51.199 --> 00:52:57.920
It penetrated public indifference, ignited outrage about the thousands of fatalities among migrant refugees.
00:52:58.639 --> 00:53:00.559
And then the world moved on.
00:53:00.800 --> 00:53:06.480
But Demir's photo remains to remind us of our callous treatment of vulnerable people.
00:53:06.719 --> 00:53:21.440
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.
00:53:22.079 --> 00:53:29.360
More than ever, these images are available to us, relentlessly accumulating on Google images, websites, social media.
00:53:29.519 --> 00:53:31.119
And so what are we to do with them?
00:53:31.280 --> 00:53:36.880
Particularly the ones that are indelible in our minds, well, that's up to us as individuals.
00:53:37.039 --> 00:53:41.840
And values like peace and freedom and justice are not a default setting.
00:53:42.079 --> 00:53:51.679
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.
00:53:52.239 --> 00:53:56.400
We have to make our own choices, guided by our own principles.
00:53:56.639 --> 00:54:04.880
But I've treasured a touchstone as the words attributed to the 18th century politician Edmund Burke.
00:54:05.519 --> 00:54:10.639
For evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing.
00:54:11.280 --> 00:54:17.119
In 1997, my younger daughter Eliza, at the age of 18, visited Auschwitz.
00:54:18.079 --> 00:54:23.599
Lee never went there, but Eliza had grown up familiar with her grandmother's Holocaust images.
00:54:23.840 --> 00:54:28.079
She came back with this images and was disappointed in it.
00:54:28.320 --> 00:54:38.320
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.
00:54:38.559 --> 00:54:41.679
But all I got is a shot of a child.
00:54:42.239 --> 00:54:51.920
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.
00:54:52.400 --> 00:55:00.559
Then Eliza got in the farm workshop, made the frame with the barbed wire, and then on the board below she added these words.
00:55:00.960 --> 00:55:03.840
From the poet George Santayana.
00:55:04.079 --> 00:55:09.199
Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it.
00:55:10.480 --> 00:55:15.760
Lee got it, sorry, Eliza got a very good mark in her GCSE exam.
00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:25.599
But best of all, a Holocaust survivor who visited the archives was really moved to see such a forceful work by one so young.
00:55:26.719 --> 00:55:33.920
I hope during this presentation you might feel you encountered my mum as well as some of her indelible images.
00:55:34.159 --> 00:55:40.800
I hope perhaps something of her spirit and her passion for peace and freedom and justice has come across to you.
00:55:40.880 --> 00:55:44.320
And if it sits well with you, please keep it.
00:55:44.559 --> 00:55:47.519
It's her gift and mine to you.
00:55:47.760 --> 00:55:52.000
And thank you for being such a wonderfully warm and friendly and supportive audience.
00:55:52.079 --> 00:55:56.320
It's been a tremendous pleasure to bring my mum here to meet you tonight.
00:55:56.480 --> 00:55:57.360
Thank you.
00:00:04.160 --> 00:00:09.119
Anthony will be delivering a lecture tonight on Lee Miller's indelible images.
00:00:09.359 --> 00:00:11.039
Welcome, Anthony Penrose.
00:00:17.839 --> 00:00:18.960
Thank you, Julian.
00:00:19.039 --> 00:00:19.679
Thank you very much.
00:00:19.839 --> 00:00:23.760
Thank you so much for coming out tonight on this wet evening.
00:00:24.960 --> 00:00:26.640
Indelible images.
00:00:26.879 --> 00:00:30.399
We are bombarded with images every minute of every day.
00:00:30.559 --> 00:00:32.079
They just come at us.
00:00:32.479 --> 00:00:35.280
Some are interesting, some are just rubbish.
00:00:35.759 --> 00:00:37.840
Images are important to us.
00:00:38.159 --> 00:00:45.039
Since the beginning of time, man and most other creatures on this planet rely on sight for survival.
00:00:45.359 --> 00:00:53.520
Images and the ability to interpret them and remember them for future reference, that's deeply ingrained in us.
00:00:54.240 --> 00:01:00.399
Movie makers tell us that 75% of the information we receive in a movie is visual.
00:01:00.719 --> 00:01:08.480
Some movie images have the power to haunt us, the indelible quality made more vivid by their ability to move.
00:01:08.799 --> 00:01:14.719
When you listen to a play on the radio, I expect you conjure up your own images to fit the story.
00:01:14.959 --> 00:01:23.359
But amid this blizzard of images that confront us every second of the day, what is it that distinguishes some of them?
00:01:23.680 --> 00:01:27.280
Do you hold on to them because they're intimately personal?
00:01:27.599 --> 00:01:30.000
For you, they're indelible.
00:01:30.239 --> 00:01:33.200
Because they connect to your memories of a treasured moment.
00:01:33.920 --> 00:01:35.760
Of course, you hold on to them.
00:01:35.920 --> 00:01:43.120
The tactile memory might fade over time, but the image itself will live with you as a surrogate memory.
00:01:43.840 --> 00:01:50.000
Some images have extreme aesthetic quality, a raw beauty that makes them lodge in your memory.
00:01:50.239 --> 00:01:55.920
Or perhaps there is something characterful about them that makes them stay in your mind.
00:01:57.040 --> 00:02:04.480
The most deeply indelible images have an assertion that overrides our will and fixes them forever in our minds.
00:02:05.040 --> 00:02:10.879
Many people, myself included, know there is no erase button for these images.
00:02:11.120 --> 00:02:16.159
They're traumatic for us and for the photographer who took them.
00:02:16.560 --> 00:02:20.000
They stay with us for the rest of our lives.
00:02:20.719 --> 00:02:23.680
This is my mum, Lee Miller.
00:02:24.159 --> 00:02:30.319
She knew a lot about images, and she knew a lot about the trauma of gathering them.
00:02:30.560 --> 00:02:35.360
She learned photography from her father, who had his own amateur dark room.
00:02:35.599 --> 00:02:40.080
He encouraged her to play rough and adventurous games with her brother from an early age.
00:02:40.240 --> 00:02:44.000
They grew up in a small upstate New York town called Poughkeepsie.
00:02:44.800 --> 00:02:51.680
When she was a teenager, she went to New York, entered art school, and one day she was walking along the pavement.
00:02:51.840 --> 00:03:04.080
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.
00:03:04.240 --> 00:03:06.159
And she did the girly thing.
00:03:06.400 --> 00:03:08.479
She fainted in his arms.
00:03:08.960 --> 00:03:12.560
Good choice, Lee, because the guy's name was Condé Nast.
00:03:13.840 --> 00:03:21.680
Owner of Vogue magazine and Vanity Fair, and within a few weeks she was front cover, Vogue March 1927.
00:03:21.759 --> 00:03:23.919
She was not yet 20 years old.
00:03:24.159 --> 00:03:31.840
This brought her to the attention of Edward Steichen, Vogue's chief photographer, and Steichen found she had the perfect looks for that period.
00:03:31.919 --> 00:03:37.120
And his photographs of her made her into what we would today call a supermodel.
00:03:37.439 --> 00:03:41.520
Coast to coast, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.
00:03:43.039 --> 00:03:51.439
But after about a year, maybe 18 months of all of this, Lee decided that she wanted to become a photographer.
00:03:51.520 --> 00:03:58.879
She had watched Steichen and those others who had photographed her, she'd watched them very carefully, and she wanted to become a photographer.
00:03:59.199 --> 00:04:15.280
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.
00:04:15.439 --> 00:04:16.959
She went and found him.
00:04:17.199 --> 00:04:24.240
She became immediately his lover, his pupil, his model, his studio assistant.
00:04:24.560 --> 00:04:29.439
And Man Ray was very generous and encouraged Lee with her photography.
00:04:29.600 --> 00:04:41.040
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.
00:04:41.199 --> 00:04:45.920
And she started cruising Montparnasse, taking pictures like this.
00:04:46.079 --> 00:04:51.920
I call them the found images because you know how fond of the found objects the Sierra Vists were.
00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:53.279
Well, these are found images.
00:04:53.439 --> 00:04:56.639
And she just snips them out of life and gives them back to us.
00:04:56.800 --> 00:04:59.360
She calls this exploding hand.
00:04:59.839 --> 00:05:03.120
Actually, this is the glass door to the Girland Perfume Shop.
00:05:03.199 --> 00:05:09.439
So many of the clientele have been wearing diamond rings that the diamonds have scratched that opaque area on the glass.
00:05:09.600 --> 00:05:23.279
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.
00:05:23.519 --> 00:05:29.600
And very often you'll find that she does just snip images out of life and give them back to us.
00:05:30.399 --> 00:05:43.199
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.
00:05:44.160 --> 00:05:50.399
Well, less than a year from arriving in Paris, Lee had her own studio going a few blocks away from Man Ray.
00:05:50.639 --> 00:05:54.399
And to save money, she started modeling for her own shots.
00:05:54.560 --> 00:06:03.120
And indeed, this was published Vogue in America, September 1930, together with another shot by Lee.
00:06:04.079 --> 00:06:11.920
Well, 1932, Lee decided to go back to New York.
00:06:12.560 --> 00:06:15.279
She and Man Ray were having a difficult time.
00:06:15.439 --> 00:06:26.959
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.
00:06:27.120 --> 00:06:31.920
And then she became the place to go for studio portraits.
00:06:32.160 --> 00:06:34.560
This lady is Mary Taylor.
00:06:34.879 --> 00:06:36.879
This is Lillian Harvey.
00:06:37.120 --> 00:06:39.360
These two women were actresses on Broadway.
00:06:39.439 --> 00:06:44.800
They wanted really commanding pictures to send to Hollywood casting directors.
00:06:45.120 --> 00:06:52.079
Two years on, 1933-34, a guy shows up.
00:06:52.319 --> 00:06:55.600
This man, Aziz Eloy Bey.
00:06:56.879 --> 00:07:01.680
He had met Lee in Paris years before, when Lee had photographed his wife.
00:07:01.839 --> 00:07:09.519
He had divorced his wife by now, and he rocked up in New York, and he asked Lee to marry him.
00:07:09.839 --> 00:07:14.160
And to everyone's shock and horror, she did.
00:07:14.879 --> 00:07:27.199
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.
00:07:27.519 --> 00:07:29.120
Aziz was very wealthy.
00:07:29.279 --> 00:07:35.360
There was not a thing that Lee could lack except mental stimulation.
00:07:35.600 --> 00:07:38.000
She so missed her friends in Paris.
00:07:38.160 --> 00:07:43.120
She missed the people around her, the buzz of the Cyrilis, the excitement.
00:07:43.519 --> 00:07:51.360
The most exciting thing her fellow expatriates could talk about was the cucumber sandwiches at the bridge party.
00:07:51.600 --> 00:07:57.759
Unsurprisingly, she grabbed her camera and she went off in the desert making long-range excursions.
00:07:57.920 --> 00:07:58.560
It was tough.
00:07:58.639 --> 00:08:01.600
The cars were only two-wheel drive, they kept on getting bogged down.
00:08:01.759 --> 00:08:03.040
There was no sat nav.
00:08:03.360 --> 00:08:09.439
They navigated using a sun compass across these trackless expanse of raw desert.
00:08:09.680 --> 00:08:21.279
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.
00:08:21.600 --> 00:08:25.920
She found her way across the desert to the oasis of Siwa.
00:08:26.720 --> 00:08:31.839
And on that journey took one of the most indelible of her images.
00:08:32.080 --> 00:08:34.320
She called it Portrait of Space.
00:08:34.559 --> 00:08:40.000
It was a little house built as a halfway point for King Fouad on his journey.
00:08:40.159 --> 00:08:42.960
So it had European windows with fly screens.
00:08:43.200 --> 00:08:45.600
But now the fly screen has broken.
00:08:45.759 --> 00:08:50.320
It's like she's waiting to burst through that hole, disappear off down the road.
00:08:50.559 --> 00:08:53.679
In the sky, is it a bird?
00:08:54.080 --> 00:08:55.279
Is it a cloud?
00:08:55.600 --> 00:08:56.559
You choose.
00:08:57.039 --> 00:08:59.120
And then there's that hatch.
00:08:59.279 --> 00:09:04.720
The hatch was there to put your hand through to close the storm shutters, but the flap has gone.
00:09:04.799 --> 00:09:08.240
It's just left us this portrait style frame.
00:09:08.639 --> 00:09:12.080
She calls it portrait of space.
00:09:12.559 --> 00:09:18.799
And that space is her gift to you for you to fill with your own dreams and your imaginings.
00:09:19.759 --> 00:09:25.120
Aziz knew how much Lee missed her friends in Paris.
00:09:25.679 --> 00:09:28.960
He gave her an airline ticket to Marseille.
00:09:29.039 --> 00:09:30.000
She boarded a train.
00:09:30.080 --> 00:09:34.159
She arrived in Paris, and the night she arrived, she went to this fantastic party.
00:09:34.320 --> 00:09:48.159
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.
00:09:48.320 --> 00:09:52.720
He was a British Surrealist artist, Roland Penrose.
00:09:52.879 --> 00:09:56.320
He would later become my dad, but he didn't know that at the time.
00:09:57.519 --> 00:10:02.480
He said meeting Lee for the first time was like being struck by lightning.
00:10:02.639 --> 00:10:04.080
It was love at first sight.
00:10:04.240 --> 00:10:06.799
They were inseparable for the rest of that summer.
00:10:06.960 --> 00:10:11.679
They went to the south of France to meet up with the old friends they had in common.
00:10:11.840 --> 00:10:16.080
On the left of the picture, that's Paul Eloir and his wife Noosh.
00:10:16.240 --> 00:10:18.399
On the right, in the hat, that's Man Ray.
00:10:18.639 --> 00:10:26.639
And the first serious girlfriend in his life, since Lee has left five years earlier, Adi Fidelin.
00:10:27.200 --> 00:10:31.039
Picasso was also there and he took a big interest in Lee.
00:10:31.679 --> 00:10:41.759
The following year, 1938, Lee and Roland met up in Athens and they made a long road trip through the Balkans to Romania.
00:10:43.039 --> 00:10:45.360
They knew the war was coming.
00:10:45.600 --> 00:10:50.159
They knew Romania had oil and the Nazis were likely to take it over.
00:10:50.399 --> 00:11:01.519
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.
00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:04.480
Already a level of persecution had begun.
00:11:04.639 --> 00:11:12.559
The authorities, partly out of fear of the Roma spreading typhoid, had forbidden them to move and to enter the markets.
00:11:12.720 --> 00:11:18.559
And this amounted to the end of their way of life, in many cases, ending their lives.
00:11:18.879 --> 00:11:23.679
For a nomadic culture, to stop moving is to start dying.
00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:25.840
Worse was to come.
00:11:27.200 --> 00:11:30.480
Roland could not live without Lee.
00:11:30.879 --> 00:11:35.120
In 1939, he went to Cairo.
00:11:35.279 --> 00:11:36.559
He met Aziz.
00:11:37.279 --> 00:11:46.559
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.
00:11:47.440 --> 00:11:56.000
He gave her freedom, he gave her his blessing, he gave her money, he gave her a steamship ticket to London.
00:11:56.399 --> 00:12:04.240
And she arrived eventually on the 3rd of September 1939.
00:12:04.639 --> 00:12:07.279
The day war was declared.
00:12:08.320 --> 00:12:15.600
To begin with, she worked from the Vogue Studios because a lot of the men had been called up for duty.
00:12:15.840 --> 00:12:22.320
And while she was taking pictures of the frocks and the handbags, the blitz was beginning.
00:12:22.480 --> 00:12:26.720
And it was as though this had been designed as something for Lee to photograph.
00:12:26.879 --> 00:12:30.799
She documented everything that was going wrong.
00:12:30.960 --> 00:12:43.200
In 1940, there were raids on 76 consecutive nights, except for one night, November the second, when inexplicably the Luftwaffe stayed home.
00:12:43.440 --> 00:12:46.799
And Lee caught it like this: one night of love.
00:12:46.879 --> 00:12:51.360
And that shows how humor can make an image indelible.
00:12:51.600 --> 00:12:54.799
And surrealism was always present in Lee.
00:12:55.039 --> 00:12:58.639
She called this exceptional achievement.
00:12:58.879 --> 00:13:01.200
And I think if you look at Mrs.
00:13:01.360 --> 00:13:02.480
Gander, Mrs.
00:13:02.559 --> 00:13:08.320
Goose there, she is saying to the gander, what are we going to feed it on when it hatches?
00:13:09.600 --> 00:13:15.840
And this poor little innocent tree in Charlotte Street is now an unexploded bomb.
00:13:16.399 --> 00:13:32.720
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.
00:13:33.360 --> 00:13:36.399
Sometimes Lee's fashion shots were a bit too challenging.
00:13:36.559 --> 00:13:38.159
This one was never used.
00:13:38.399 --> 00:13:46.240
In a way, it's a reaction to the triviality of fashion when other really serious things are happening in the street outside.
00:13:46.799 --> 00:13:56.399
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.
00:13:56.799 --> 00:14:01.600
And Lee knew that she would never be given a gun to shoot or a plane to fly.
00:14:01.919 --> 00:14:06.720
But she had her camera, and that became her weapon of choice.
00:14:07.360 --> 00:14:09.519
These are ATS women.
00:14:09.679 --> 00:14:11.600
They're operating a searchlight.
00:14:11.759 --> 00:14:17.919
Their work was highly dangerous because when the German bombers came over, they shot straight at the searchlight crews.
00:14:18.159 --> 00:14:23.440
743 of these women were killed, wounded, or missing in action.
00:14:24.240 --> 00:14:31.200
The Women's Royal Navy Service, the Wrens were mainly responsible for jobs like operating and maintaining and testing radios.
00:14:31.360 --> 00:14:32.799
Many of them were armorers.
00:14:32.879 --> 00:14:35.919
They did just about every non-combatant job there was.
00:14:36.879 --> 00:14:40.240
Incredibly skilled, incredibly responsible.
00:14:42.159 --> 00:14:49.120
Audrey and Lee wanted to show Britain the massive contribution the women were making to the war effort.
00:14:49.440 --> 00:14:52.240
This woman is a torpedo mechanic.
00:14:52.480 --> 00:15:00.080
If she or her mates get it wrong, there's enough explosives stacked around them to take the whole of Gossport off the map.
00:15:01.120 --> 00:15:05.440
The Normandy landings came on the 6th of June 1944.
00:15:05.600 --> 00:15:15.759
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.
00:15:16.399 --> 00:15:29.200
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.
00:15:30.240 --> 00:15:37.840
Lee covered all aspects of this amazing work and filed over 10,000 words and more than 40 rolls of film.
00:15:38.000 --> 00:15:43.840
It was published in Vogue September 1944, titled Unarmed Warriors.
00:15:44.159 --> 00:15:48.799
Her stories dominated Vogue features for the next year and a half.
00:15:49.200 --> 00:15:54.080
Her next overseas assignment became her first experience of combat.
00:15:54.320 --> 00:16:05.360
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.
00:16:05.519 --> 00:16:06.960
83rd Division.
00:16:07.200 --> 00:16:17.759
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.
00:16:18.480 --> 00:16:32.799
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.
00:16:33.039 --> 00:16:36.000
But then Lee witnessed a napalm strike.
00:16:36.240 --> 00:16:39.519
It was only the third time this weapon had been used.
00:16:39.759 --> 00:16:47.120
The burning liquid entered the ventilation shaft, sucking out all the oxygen and threatening to detonate the stores of ammunition.
00:16:47.519 --> 00:16:53.519
Colonel von Auchloch, a veteran of Stalingrad, had vowed to fight to the last man.
00:16:54.080 --> 00:16:58.720
But after the napalm strike, he wisely surrendered and Lee scooped that moment.
00:16:59.039 --> 00:17:04.400
And she found she had plenty of time to write her San Marlowe story because the U.S.
00:17:04.559 --> 00:17:09.359
Army put her under house arrest for violating the terms of her accreditation.
00:17:09.599 --> 00:17:15.119
But she got out in time to join the race for Paris and arrived during the Liberation.
00:17:15.359 --> 00:17:20.640
She described the streets filled with screaming, sheering, pretty people.
00:17:21.440 --> 00:17:23.519
She went to Picasso's studio.
00:17:23.680 --> 00:17:26.880
He nearly fell over backwards when he opened the door and found she was there.
00:17:27.039 --> 00:17:32.000
He hugged her, he kissed her all over, and then he stood back and he said, C'est incroyable.
00:17:33.039 --> 00:17:34.720
It's incredible.
00:17:35.039 --> 00:17:39.839
The first Allied soldier I should see is a woman, and she is you.
00:17:40.079 --> 00:17:43.680
I mean, not even his Picasso could get his head around that quickly.
00:17:43.920 --> 00:17:57.920
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.
00:17:58.079 --> 00:18:00.400
The Germans had their backs to their own frontier.
00:18:00.480 --> 00:18:02.640
They were fighting with incredible ferocity.
00:18:02.880 --> 00:18:03.759
Lee was there.
00:18:03.920 --> 00:18:10.319
She was there when the Allies punched into Germany at several fronts in the spring of 1945.
00:18:11.920 --> 00:18:12.559
Bonn.
00:18:13.279 --> 00:18:17.359
Hundreds of people died in a direct hit on an air raid shelter here.
00:18:17.759 --> 00:18:22.079
Cologne, the oldest cathedral in Europe, nearly reduced to rubble.
00:18:22.319 --> 00:18:26.960
We can get a hint of the anger driving Lee forward in this moment.
00:18:27.279 --> 00:18:35.039
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.
00:18:35.359 --> 00:18:38.480
Lee's caption for this image hit me hard.
00:18:38.720 --> 00:18:42.400
She wrote, This is a good German.
00:18:42.799 --> 00:18:44.000
He's dead.
00:18:44.559 --> 00:18:52.880
I thought, how can you look into the face of a teenage boy and be glad he's dead?
00:18:53.920 --> 00:18:59.759
Frankfurt, the roof of the Festhaler transformed into the giant spider's web.
00:19:00.240 --> 00:19:04.319
Ludwigshaven, the Allied bombing had destroyed the vast chemical plants.
00:19:04.400 --> 00:19:08.880
Lee noted that whole streets were dyed bright colours by the spilled chemicals.
00:19:09.039 --> 00:19:13.839
When you spot the soldier there, you get an idea of the scale of that place.
00:19:14.720 --> 00:19:18.960
Nuremberg, the ancient city, founded in 1050.
00:19:19.119 --> 00:19:33.839
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.
00:19:34.480 --> 00:19:39.599
In Leipzig, Lee encountered some deaths she did not mourn.
00:19:40.079 --> 00:19:49.440
Kurt Lisso, the city treasurer, his wife, and his daughter, and some of the military people, had killed themselves.
00:19:49.920 --> 00:19:52.559
They had thought it was the Russians attacking the city.
00:19:52.720 --> 00:19:57.599
It was a very bad idea to be captured by the Russians if you were a Nazi official.
00:19:57.759 --> 00:20:02.960
It was an even worse idea to be captured by the Russians if you were a Nazi woman.
00:20:03.200 --> 00:20:07.279
So they all crunched their cyanide capsules and died.
00:20:09.119 --> 00:20:14.160
Lee visited four concentration camps inside Germany.
00:20:14.480 --> 00:20:19.039
Odurf, Pennink, Buchenwald, and Dachau.
00:20:19.519 --> 00:20:21.680
This is the gates of Buchenwald.
00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:27.279
The sign translates colloquially as you get what you deserve.
00:20:27.759 --> 00:20:30.799
How could anyone deserve this?
00:20:31.519 --> 00:20:34.400
Li arrived in Dachau on the 30th of April.
00:20:34.480 --> 00:20:35.920
It was the first day of its freedom.
00:20:36.079 --> 00:20:44.799
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.
00:20:45.759 --> 00:20:50.480
These prisoners, mainly Dutch, are seen singing their national anthem.
00:20:50.799 --> 00:20:53.200
They were relatively new arrivals in the camp.
00:20:53.440 --> 00:20:56.319
Most others were not in such good shape.
00:20:56.640 --> 00:21:00.319
Some of these images are from Buchenwald, some are from Dachau.
00:21:00.480 --> 00:21:02.160
The exact location makes little difference.
00:21:02.319 --> 00:21:14.000
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.
00:21:14.559 --> 00:21:17.359
Lee's wartime buddy, David E.
00:21:17.759 --> 00:21:19.519
Scherman, was with her.
00:21:19.920 --> 00:21:25.599
He told me she was encased in ice cold rage.
00:21:26.240 --> 00:21:29.680
By now the war was very, very personal to Lee.
00:21:29.920 --> 00:21:33.440
When she arrived in Paris, so many of her friends were missing.
00:21:33.599 --> 00:21:35.839
No one knew what their fate had been.
00:21:36.079 --> 00:21:39.279
Now she knew and she would never forgive.
00:21:40.079 --> 00:21:47.279
In Dachau, in a street beside the camp, they found a train halted outside the gates.
00:21:47.519 --> 00:21:53.599
It had left Buchenwald 30 days earlier, loaded with 3,102 prisoners.
00:21:53.759 --> 00:21:56.960
The GIs found one survivor.
00:21:57.279 --> 00:21:59.279
The rest had died of starvation.
00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:00.960
They died of thirst.
00:22:01.039 --> 00:22:02.079
They died of exposure.
00:22:02.160 --> 00:22:03.200
They died of disease.
00:22:03.359 --> 00:22:08.880
Some had been beaten to death, others had been shot, and in every single case it was murder.
00:22:09.039 --> 00:22:12.400
They were all unarmed civilian prisoners.
00:22:13.279 --> 00:22:25.200
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.
00:22:25.680 --> 00:22:38.799
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.
00:22:39.039 --> 00:22:51.039
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.
00:22:51.839 --> 00:22:59.759
So that the wagon that makes the rounds every day can pick them up like just so much garbage.
00:23:01.359 --> 00:23:04.799
The bodies were piled in heaps outside the crematorium.
00:23:04.960 --> 00:23:08.319
The furnaces had run out of coal five days earlier.
00:23:08.559 --> 00:23:11.599
So there was no hiding the evidence.
00:23:11.920 --> 00:23:21.839
Many prisoners wandered helplessly and uncomprehending, endlessly scavenging the rubbish heaps for clothing, or the greatest prize of all, a scrap of food.
00:23:22.160 --> 00:23:27.440
Some of the guards had put on civilian clothing, but the prisoners recognized them and beat them mercilessly.
00:23:27.519 --> 00:23:30.880
The GIs put them in their own jails for their protection.
00:23:31.119 --> 00:23:34.880
One guard killed himself, he hung himself sitting down.
00:23:35.200 --> 00:23:40.079
And this man, Klaus Horningck, remained defiant to the end.
00:23:40.240 --> 00:23:49.759
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.
00:23:51.440 --> 00:23:58.720
British Vogue published very few of Lee's words and her pictures, but American Vogue ran many images.
00:23:58.960 --> 00:24:00.960
The headline reads, Believe it.
00:24:01.279 --> 00:24:08.880
Lee had cabled to Audrey Withers the words, I implore you to believe this is true.
00:24:09.519 --> 00:24:17.440
She was aware that people were already denying the Holocaust and she wanted her evidence as a witness to be made known.
00:24:18.559 --> 00:24:26.480
We have to ask, if we're going to be objective, how reliable was Lee Miller as a witness?
00:24:27.519 --> 00:24:34.319
I've studied the US Army records and the official histories produced by Dachau KZ and Buchenweld KZ Museums.
00:24:34.559 --> 00:24:39.039
They accurately support the facts behind Lee's photographs and her writings.
00:24:39.200 --> 00:24:41.119
But there's something else.
00:24:43.519 --> 00:24:45.359
There were other witnesses.
00:24:46.079 --> 00:24:48.400
This is the already mentioned David E.
00:24:48.559 --> 00:24:52.559
Sherman, a very distinguished Life magazine combat photographer.
00:24:52.799 --> 00:24:57.039
Sherman and Lee met as two Yanks in Britain in early 1943.
00:24:57.119 --> 00:25:07.440
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.
00:25:08.079 --> 00:25:19.759
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.
00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:22.319
And although initially assigned to the U.S.
00:25:22.480 --> 00:25:31.680
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.
00:25:32.480 --> 00:25:34.960
I met Sherman in 1976.
00:25:35.599 --> 00:25:40.720
After my mum died, he became indispensable in setting up the Lee Miller archives.
00:25:40.799 --> 00:25:43.039
I spent weeks in his American home.
00:25:43.200 --> 00:25:52.000
He gave me hundreds of hours of interview with incredible attention for accuracy, for dates, places, people's names.
00:25:52.559 --> 00:25:57.200
I could never have written my biography, The Lives of Lee Miller, without him.
00:25:57.599 --> 00:26:00.640
He wrote the foreword for Lee Miller's war.
00:26:01.119 --> 00:26:03.200
Sherman was unimpeachable.
00:26:03.440 --> 00:26:06.160
He was there for most of Lee's war.
00:26:06.559 --> 00:26:08.880
He absolutely corroborated her evidence.
00:26:08.960 --> 00:26:16.559
It was he who described Lee Miller as being fiercely intolerant of sham, and he valued her honesty above all.
00:26:17.839 --> 00:26:20.960
I've had the privilege of connecting with other witnesses.
00:26:21.200 --> 00:26:27.680
In December 2007, this lady, Marianne Sweeney, came to visit me at the Lee Miller Archive.
00:26:27.920 --> 00:26:33.119
She was researching the history of her father who had died when she was five years old.
00:26:33.359 --> 00:26:37.759
Captain Joseph Bernard Sweeney served as a surgeon in the U.S.
00:26:37.920 --> 00:26:41.519
Army for four years and was awarded the Bronze Star.
00:26:42.240 --> 00:26:46.799
He had been one of those surgeons in the Brickville Evacuation Hospital.
00:26:47.039 --> 00:26:48.640
We searched the files.
00:26:48.720 --> 00:26:50.559
But most of the doctors were masked.
00:26:50.640 --> 00:26:51.680
It was so frustrating.
00:26:51.759 --> 00:27:00.559
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.
00:27:01.359 --> 00:27:07.519
Then Marianne showed me this shot her father had taken on his own camera, and I knew we had a match.
00:27:07.920 --> 00:27:14.559
The frame of his picture is a rectangular format, and it has a different focal length to Lee's.
00:27:14.799 --> 00:27:29.119
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.
00:27:29.359 --> 00:27:37.519
Captain Sweeney's next picture shows he went round the other side of the rail car and photographed through the newly opened door.
00:27:38.799 --> 00:27:43.279
So was Captain Sweeney in the photograph by Lee Miller.
00:27:43.680 --> 00:27:50.480
The soldier on the right is wearing a uniform and carrying a sidearm, a pistol, that is, that suggests he was an officer.
00:27:50.720 --> 00:27:52.640
Was he Captain Sweeney?
00:27:53.279 --> 00:27:58.960
Could the soldier on the left walking away be Captain Sweeney just after he's taken his picture?
00:27:59.680 --> 00:28:02.960
Marianne had two other photos taken by her father.
00:28:03.279 --> 00:28:07.680
This one taken further along the train, and this one.
00:28:08.480 --> 00:28:14.400
And then I realized it was a chilling familiarity.
00:28:15.119 --> 00:28:19.599
It's the reverse angle of this photograph by Lee Miller.
00:28:20.160 --> 00:28:30.079
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.
00:28:30.400 --> 00:28:35.119
It is possible to find where the photographer was standing when the picture was taken.
00:28:35.279 --> 00:28:45.680
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.
00:28:46.079 --> 00:28:53.039
Seen here adjusting what looks like a folding Kodak, that camera would be consistent with the format of his negatives.
00:28:53.279 --> 00:29:06.400
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.
00:29:08.000 --> 00:29:09.680
The story didn't end there.
00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:13.200
Five years later, Marianne sent me this shot.
00:29:13.440 --> 00:29:16.960
Do you remember I told you the GIs found one survivor?
00:29:17.200 --> 00:29:22.400
Well, one of the soldiers who found the survivor was Captain Sweeney.
00:29:24.160 --> 00:29:30.000
Both our parents had suffered badly with post-traumatic stress in the years after the war.
00:29:30.400 --> 00:29:35.920
Neither had ever spoken about the extraordinary things they'd witnessed and the heroic things they'd done.
00:29:36.240 --> 00:29:43.039
And looking back on their eyewitness photographs, can there be any real doubt about the authenticity of these images?
00:29:43.200 --> 00:29:45.279
If there is, bring it on.
00:29:45.440 --> 00:29:46.559
I want to hear it.
00:29:46.720 --> 00:29:55.200
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.
00:29:56.559 --> 00:30:07.200
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.
00:30:07.440 --> 00:30:11.759
Sorry, they drove about 30 kilometers down the road from Dachau to Munich.
00:30:11.920 --> 00:30:18.640
And they were invited by the Signal Corps to share a luxurious billet in Hitler's apartment.
00:30:18.960 --> 00:30:23.279
It was probably the only building in Munich to have coal.
00:30:23.519 --> 00:30:26.480
So it had hot water in the tub.
00:30:27.599 --> 00:30:32.160
Lee hops in first, and they set the shot up.
00:30:32.480 --> 00:30:39.359
The photo on the edge of the tub is a picture by Hitler's revolting personal photographer called Heinrich Hoffmann.
00:30:39.519 --> 00:30:49.440
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.
00:30:49.920 --> 00:30:56.640
It reads Einvolk, Einleich, Ein Fuhrer, Gross Deutschland.
00:30:57.519 --> 00:31:05.039
One race, one nation, one leader, great Germany.
00:31:05.279 --> 00:31:11.920
You can imagine how I feel when certain international leaders start talking about making something great again.
00:31:12.160 --> 00:31:14.960
Doesn't anybody remember what happened last time?
00:31:15.200 --> 00:31:19.039
Anyway, it's not the photograph that's the key to this.
00:31:20.079 --> 00:31:21.359
It's the boots.
00:31:21.599 --> 00:31:36.480
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.
00:31:36.880 --> 00:31:39.200
She's not sitting there as a guest.
00:31:39.440 --> 00:31:44.960
She's a victor, metaphorically grinding her heel into Hitler's face.
00:31:45.279 --> 00:31:51.440
And she dried herself on his lemon yellow bath towel with its AH monogram.
00:31:52.079 --> 00:31:53.920
And there's something else.
00:31:54.240 --> 00:32:06.960
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.
00:32:07.359 --> 00:32:20.160
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.
00:32:20.400 --> 00:32:23.200
The retreating troopers had set fire to it.
00:32:24.319 --> 00:32:31.359
I visited the site in 2005 with a couple of German historians who were making a radio program about Lee.
00:32:31.519 --> 00:32:35.599
I stood in the same place where Lee stood to get this picture.
00:32:35.839 --> 00:32:40.079
At this point, Lee and Sherman were unsupported in enemy territory.
00:32:40.240 --> 00:32:43.839
They were actually three miles ahead of the front line of the army.
00:32:44.000 --> 00:32:53.519
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.
00:32:54.400 --> 00:33:01.359
I stood there sixty years and ten days later, the same time of day, the same weather.
00:33:01.680 --> 00:33:07.839
Not a trace of Hitler remained except for a little wooden peg right here.
00:33:08.160 --> 00:33:20.079
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.
00:33:20.960 --> 00:33:37.440
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.
00:33:37.759 --> 00:33:43.279
Justifiable reason to crack open the bottle of champagne they'd looted from Hitler's cellar.
00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:47.039
A few days later, the war was over.
00:33:47.440 --> 00:33:50.400
Sherman was recalled by Life magazine.
00:33:51.680 --> 00:33:55.119
He turned west, back to Paris, London, and New York.
00:33:55.279 --> 00:33:58.960
Lee turned east to follow the GIs into Austria and Hungary.
00:33:59.119 --> 00:34:11.039
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.
00:34:11.440 --> 00:34:14.559
There was no sign of the brave new world.
00:34:14.719 --> 00:34:17.519
Everyone in the free world had fought for it.
00:34:17.760 --> 00:34:22.800
She felt that the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians had died for nothing.
00:34:22.960 --> 00:34:28.079
She felt the desolation of the countless refugees trying to reach their homes.
00:34:28.400 --> 00:34:30.000
She reached Vienna.
00:34:30.480 --> 00:34:35.920
The fighting had been intense as the Russians and the Americans simultaneously advanced on the city.
00:34:36.079 --> 00:34:39.679
Today the city bears no trace of the conflict.
00:34:40.239 --> 00:34:44.480
But then it was wrecked by Allied bombs and the fires that followed.
00:34:44.639 --> 00:34:44.800
St.
00:34:44.960 --> 00:34:48.960
Stephen's Cathedral had been badly damaged and lost most of its roof.
00:34:49.280 --> 00:34:59.760
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.
00:35:00.159 --> 00:35:09.760
Lee photographed Ermgard Siefried singing an aria from Madame Butterfly on the stage, accompanied by the contrapuntal crash of falling masonry.
00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:15.440
It was symbolic of the triumph of culture and beauty over destruction.
00:35:16.559 --> 00:35:20.960
But she found few triumphs in the Vilhelmina Children's Hospital.
00:35:21.119 --> 00:35:27.199
The black marketeers had stolen all the drugs, exactly as was portrayed in the movie The Third Man.
00:35:27.840 --> 00:35:32.559
She wrote in a dispatch that unsurprisingly was never published in vogue.
00:35:33.840 --> 00:35:37.119
For an hour I watched a baby die.
00:35:37.840 --> 00:35:40.639
He was dark blue when I first saw him.
00:35:40.880 --> 00:35:52.480
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.
00:35:52.880 --> 00:35:57.679
I'd thought all babies looked alike, but that was healthy babies.
00:35:57.920 --> 00:35:59.760
There are many faces for the dying.
00:35:59.920 --> 00:36:01.599
This wasn't a two-month baby.
00:36:01.679 --> 00:36:03.599
He was a skinny gladiator.
00:36:03.760 --> 00:36:10.079
He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched.
00:36:10.239 --> 00:36:23.280
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.
00:36:23.440 --> 00:36:27.440
There was nothing to do but watch him die.
00:36:28.960 --> 00:36:33.920
This tiny baby fought for his only possession, life.
00:36:34.239 --> 00:36:36.320
As if it might be worth something.
00:36:36.880 --> 00:36:45.360
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.
00:36:48.239 --> 00:36:49.840
Lee got through to Budapest.
00:36:50.880 --> 00:36:54.960
It seems hunger, poverty, and endless suffering were everywhere she went.
00:36:55.039 --> 00:36:57.920
There was still no sign of that brave new world.
00:36:58.239 --> 00:37:00.800
Her disillusionment was intense.
00:37:01.119 --> 00:37:07.760
She witnessed the execution of Laszlo Bardoshi, the fascist ex-prime minister of Hungary.
00:37:07.920 --> 00:37:14.639
Not even killing fascists brought Lee any relief from the intensely bitter disillusionment that had settled on her.
00:37:14.880 --> 00:37:16.800
She went on into Romania.
00:37:16.960 --> 00:37:23.760
She found the Roma and Sinti people she had photographed before the war had mostly been murdered by the fascists.
00:37:24.079 --> 00:37:26.960
By now, she was utterly exhausted.
00:37:27.119 --> 00:37:28.159
She was ill.
00:37:28.320 --> 00:37:31.199
She was drained of the will to carry on.
00:37:31.840 --> 00:37:37.199
Roland had written her endless letters imploring her to come home, but she didn't answer him.
00:37:37.519 --> 00:37:42.320
It was only occasional news from Audrey Withers at Vogue that told him where she was.
00:37:42.800 --> 00:37:46.000
And then Sherman sent her a telegram.
00:37:46.239 --> 00:37:49.679
It simply said, Go home.
00:37:50.480 --> 00:37:52.000
Lee cable back.
00:37:52.960 --> 00:37:53.280
Okay.
00:37:54.880 --> 00:37:56.480
Roland met her in Paris.
00:37:56.639 --> 00:37:57.599
He was horrified.
00:37:57.679 --> 00:37:59.679
She was so beaten down.
00:38:00.239 --> 00:38:01.199
So ill.
00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:04.239
So destroyed almost.
00:38:04.480 --> 00:38:09.440
He gently brought her home to London and she had become a very different person.
00:38:09.679 --> 00:38:11.519
She had changed so much.
00:38:12.079 --> 00:38:16.239
Soon after he met her in 1937, Roland had painted her like this.
00:38:16.400 --> 00:38:17.760
Her face is like the sun.
00:38:17.920 --> 00:38:18.800
That's appropriate.
00:38:18.880 --> 00:38:23.599
She had this searingly bright intellect and radiated warmth of personality.
00:38:24.079 --> 00:38:25.519
Earth is her legs.
00:38:25.760 --> 00:38:27.039
Air is her body.
00:38:27.360 --> 00:38:28.880
Fire is her warmth.
00:38:29.119 --> 00:38:30.880
But we see no water.
00:38:31.199 --> 00:38:35.360
Water is usually recognized as the allegory for emotion.
00:38:35.920 --> 00:38:42.079
And both Roland and Lee detested display of what they called sentimentality.
00:38:42.559 --> 00:38:45.519
After the war, Roland painted her like this.
00:38:45.840 --> 00:38:47.280
The colours are muted.
00:38:47.440 --> 00:38:54.559
Her body fragmented, and a large black spot occludes the brilliance of her face.
00:38:54.800 --> 00:38:56.480
Later still, he painted her like this.
00:38:56.639 --> 00:39:03.519
Her body is fragmented, broken up, washed up on a strange shore with a storm-filled sky.
00:39:03.679 --> 00:39:06.639
And his last portrait was in 1949.
00:39:07.039 --> 00:39:11.039
His once beautiful muse is now consumed by conflict.
00:39:11.199 --> 00:39:16.880
By now I had been born and I added to her troubles by giving her a massive dose of postnatal depression.
00:39:17.119 --> 00:39:23.519
You can see the anxiety and anger in her face and the impenetrable blackness that fills her body.
00:39:24.719 --> 00:39:27.360
The following lines are from a drama I wrote.
00:39:27.519 --> 00:39:30.239
It was titled Portrait of Space.
00:39:30.480 --> 00:39:39.280
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.
00:39:39.599 --> 00:39:43.840
I hope they express the state of mind that Lee was in.
00:39:44.079 --> 00:39:48.480
If you can imagine it, this is Lee's inner voice.
00:39:50.800 --> 00:39:55.360
When I close my eyes to sleep, there's blackness.
00:39:55.920 --> 00:39:58.719
Beautiful, serene blackness.
00:39:58.880 --> 00:40:04.880
And then behind my eyelids, the picture show begins unbidden and unstoppable.
00:40:05.440 --> 00:40:09.119
The faces of the dead piled like cordwood.
00:40:10.480 --> 00:40:14.000
The children dying in the Vienna hospital.
00:40:14.320 --> 00:40:20.480
The boys in the battlefield who knew somewhere along the line they sure as hell were gonna die.
00:40:21.039 --> 00:40:24.000
Their white faces when they are dead.
00:40:24.800 --> 00:40:27.920
At first, the pictures are silent.
00:40:28.480 --> 00:40:32.000
And then I hear the screaming shells and the explosions.
00:40:32.159 --> 00:40:36.000
I hear the screaming men, their cries tearing the frozen air.
00:40:36.239 --> 00:40:40.559
I hear the shallow breathing of the wounded who are not gonna make it through the night.
00:40:40.800 --> 00:40:42.480
Then I get the smell.
00:40:43.119 --> 00:40:52.559
The acrid smell of cordite, the smell of blood, the reek of decay, the stink of shit, the corrosive odor of mindless cruelty.
00:40:53.119 --> 00:41:04.159
Here in peaceful Hampstead, the tendrils of my war wrap themselves around my heart, lacerating like strands of barbed wire.
00:41:08.400 --> 00:41:19.039
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.
00:41:19.280 --> 00:41:23.760
But in 1949, the usual solution was called the stiff upper lip.
00:41:24.079 --> 00:41:26.639
You put up and you shut up.
00:41:26.880 --> 00:41:31.679
Aware that there were millions like you who'd suffered appalling trauma throughout the war.
00:41:31.840 --> 00:41:38.480
And it was not going to be you who let the side down by failing to cope, by blubbing all over the place.
00:41:38.639 --> 00:41:40.239
No, you carried on.
00:41:40.480 --> 00:41:47.119
There was no understanding, there was no cure, just whiskey, and Lee drank to try and blot out the memories.
00:41:47.360 --> 00:41:53.039
But no amount of whiskey could erase the indelible images seared into her retina.
00:41:53.760 --> 00:41:58.559
Rowland tried to help, but he couldn't reach in to calm her mind.
00:41:58.800 --> 00:42:02.320
How he wished he could have done something to ease her torment.
00:42:02.480 --> 00:42:05.599
She fought hard, but the odds were against her.
00:42:06.320 --> 00:42:10.239
In 1949, my parents bought a small farm in Sussex.
00:42:10.320 --> 00:42:11.840
It became her home.
00:42:12.400 --> 00:42:16.159
And Lee, as a mother, was a hazard.
00:42:16.880 --> 00:42:21.280
Some of you may know that growing up with an alcoholic parent is really difficult.
00:42:21.519 --> 00:42:26.800
Constant mood swings, absences from home, unpredictable behavior.
00:42:27.360 --> 00:42:29.360
And she was really remote.
00:42:29.599 --> 00:42:35.760
She was never violent, she didn't need to be, she could do all the damage she wanted with words.
00:42:36.239 --> 00:42:38.559
She was good with words.
00:42:39.199 --> 00:42:43.840
But luckily, Lee knew that she had no inclination or instinct to be a mother.
00:42:44.000 --> 00:42:55.519
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.
00:42:55.760 --> 00:42:58.960
She gave me the peace and the security I needed.
00:42:59.119 --> 00:43:04.000
She became my de facto mother, the grandmother to my children, the great-grandmother to theirs.
00:43:04.159 --> 00:43:08.960
She was in my life 57 years and four days.
00:43:09.199 --> 00:43:16.000
But my relationship with Lee deteriorated, and in my teenage years it became a form of warfare.
00:43:16.239 --> 00:43:18.960
We fought with incredible ferocity.
00:43:19.519 --> 00:43:23.679
But in the early 70s, I went overseas for three years.
00:43:23.920 --> 00:43:29.280
And when I returned, I was married to my late wife, Susanna.
00:43:29.840 --> 00:43:34.000
Susanna made a bridge between me and Lee.
00:43:35.199 --> 00:43:41.840
We crossed from opposite ends, met in the middle, and became friends.
00:43:43.039 --> 00:43:48.320
In the mid 60s, Lee had made the finest achievement of her life.
00:43:48.559 --> 00:43:50.719
Entirely with her own willpower.
00:43:51.039 --> 00:43:53.760
She got control of her drinking.
00:43:54.159 --> 00:43:57.679
She reinvented herself as a celebrity chef.
00:43:57.840 --> 00:43:59.840
She was featured in the pages of Vogue.
00:44:00.239 --> 00:44:02.320
And House and Gardens magazine.
00:44:02.639 --> 00:44:05.039
Surrealism hit the kitchen head on.
00:44:05.199 --> 00:44:11.280
We had dishes like blue spaghetti, green chicken, gold meatloaf, and pink cauliflower breasts.
00:44:11.360 --> 00:44:16.000
And it was a moment of great deliberation before I brought my girlfriends home for supper.
00:44:18.559 --> 00:44:22.800
Lee and Rowland finally found they could get on really well.
00:44:23.440 --> 00:44:34.239
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.
00:44:34.880 --> 00:44:42.320
Amy, now 49 years on, is the very able CEO of the Lee Miller Archive.
00:44:43.199 --> 00:44:48.000
So what is it that qualifies so many of Lee's photographs as indelible images?
00:44:48.159 --> 00:44:52.239
That memorable quality of an image is subjective.
00:44:52.480 --> 00:44:56.320
You'll find some images stick in your mind more readily than others.
00:44:56.639 --> 00:45:03.920
Thinking back on the selection, you have seen some are shocking, some are subtle, some are quirky.
00:45:04.480 --> 00:45:11.599
But to allow you to respond, they first of all have to be made visible so you can see them.
00:45:13.360 --> 00:45:18.960
When Lee died, her work had become virtually invisible, and that's the way she wanted it.
00:45:19.199 --> 00:45:27.199
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.
00:45:27.440 --> 00:45:30.480
She refused to discuss her photographic career with anyone.
00:45:30.639 --> 00:45:41.760
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.
00:45:41.920 --> 00:45:49.599
The boxes contained something like 60,000 negatives, manuscripts, letters, military orders, maps, luscious vintage prints.
00:45:49.760 --> 00:46:01.119
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.
00:46:01.519 --> 00:46:08.639
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.
00:46:08.880 --> 00:46:22.960
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.
00:46:23.280 --> 00:46:26.480
We also hold about 10,000 vintage prints.
00:46:26.639 --> 00:46:36.480
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.
00:46:36.800 --> 00:46:39.599
These are from the liberation of Dachau.
00:46:40.079 --> 00:46:44.159
We were joined by Carol Callow, who worked with us for more than 30 years.
00:46:44.320 --> 00:46:54.320
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.
00:46:54.480 --> 00:46:59.199
And she made many of the fine prints you can see on display at Tate Britain.
00:46:59.599 --> 00:47:06.239
In her time with us, Carol printed every single new silver gelatin print that's come out of the archive.
00:47:06.400 --> 00:47:14.960
And I believe that much of the success of Lee's work is currently due to the excellent standards that Carol consistently achieved.
00:47:15.519 --> 00:47:19.599
Early on, Thames and Hudson commissioned me to write the biography of Lee Miller.
00:47:19.920 --> 00:47:25.119
It was published in 1985 and it began the process of making Lee visible.
00:47:25.440 --> 00:47:36.239
More recently, 2007, Mark Hayworth Booth wrote this book, which is the catalogue for Lee Miller's centennial exhibition at the Victorian Albert Museum.
00:47:36.400 --> 00:47:44.320
It toured to Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Paris, and was seen by more than half a million visitors.
00:47:44.639 --> 00:47:53.679
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.
00:47:53.920 --> 00:47:59.039
And for the last 25 years, we've had up to five headline shows a year in different countries.
00:47:59.199 --> 00:48:04.960
This is legendary Lee Miller in the Galleria Jacopic in Ljubljana, 2010.
00:48:05.119 --> 00:48:10.320
And I find it very satisfying to introduce Lee's work to such a broad selection of people.
00:48:10.639 --> 00:48:15.519
In 2015, we had a magnificent show at the Albertina in Vienna.
00:48:15.760 --> 00:48:28.400
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.
00:48:28.639 --> 00:48:36.880
But by 2015, the Albertina was ready for its first ever photographic exhibition, and we were very honored they chose Lee.
00:48:37.280 --> 00:48:41.760
Lee is currently at Tate Britain with the largest ever retrospective of her work.
00:48:42.159 --> 00:48:48.079
It's taken us 49 years since Susanna discovered Lee's work in the attic to achieve this.
00:48:48.239 --> 00:49:01.760
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.
00:49:02.400 --> 00:49:09.519
Lee had some exceptionally good reviews at the tape, very high attendance figures right from the first day.
00:49:10.480 --> 00:49:24.320
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.
00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:36.800
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.
00:49:37.039 --> 00:49:43.199
And she showed Lee's endurance for the horrors of the war and the harsh conditions of the battlefield.
00:49:43.599 --> 00:49:48.320
She also gives us an idea of Lee's intelligence and determination and compassion.
00:49:48.719 --> 00:49:54.719
Characteristics that I feel have contributed to making Lee's images indelible.
00:49:56.559 --> 00:50:04.239
Lee has been described as a photographer's film because the process of photography is at its core.
00:50:04.480 --> 00:50:13.199
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.
00:50:14.320 --> 00:50:15.920
Kate was our main producer.
00:50:16.079 --> 00:50:18.480
Kate Solomon was also a producer.
00:50:18.719 --> 00:50:25.199
Our director was Ellen Curas, and many of the people, key people on the movie, were women.
00:50:25.440 --> 00:50:34.559
If you go see Lee and you find it has authenticity, remember it's a movie about a woman made by women.
00:50:34.719 --> 00:50:37.440
And for me, that's why it succeeds.
00:50:38.239 --> 00:50:42.480
Lee's old home at Farley Farmhouse has become a place of pilgrimage.
00:50:42.559 --> 00:50:47.679
And my daughter Amy helps to run the tours for our visitors who've come from all parts of the world.
00:50:47.840 --> 00:50:53.039
Lee's images have an enduring fascination for people from all walks of life.
00:50:53.199 --> 00:50:57.599
And of course, the historical content is of critical importance.
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And that leads us to why Lee's testimonial was important.
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Lee was an independent freelance photographer.
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She was known for her standing for peace and freedom and justice.
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And she was known for her uncompromising honesty.
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So why are indelible images important in a modern context?
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Will any of us ever forget 9-11?
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We need to remember conflict did not end with the war in 1945.
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These people are Palestinians, displaced from their lands by the formation of the State of Israel.
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Today we witness a genocide perpetrated against the Palestinians by the Israelis.
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A flood of indelible images reaches us every day.
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This image is by Jonathan Whittle.
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It shows a school inside Jabaliyyah.
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In the notes for this image, Jonathan Whittle tells us the bodies are partially eaten by dogs and cats.
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It seems conflict and the consequences of human suffering and refugees has always been and always will be with us.
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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.
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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.
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The image became an international icon.
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Demir's compassion comes through so forcefully we can't help but be moved.
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It penetrated public indifference, ignited outrage about the thousands of fatalities among migrant refugees.
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And then the world moved on.
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But Demir's photo remains to remind us of our callous treatment of vulnerable people.
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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.
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More than ever, these images are available to us, relentlessly accumulating on Google images, websites, social media.
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And so what are we to do with them?
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Particularly the ones that are indelible in our minds, well, that's up to us as individuals.
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And values like peace and freedom and justice are not a default setting.
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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.
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We have to make our own choices, guided by our own principles.
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But I've treasured a touchstone as the words attributed to the 18th century politician Edmund Burke.
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For evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing.
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In 1997, my younger daughter Eliza, at the age of 18, visited Auschwitz.
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Lee never went there, but Eliza had grown up familiar with her grandmother's Holocaust images.
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She came back with this images and was disappointed in it.
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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.
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But all I got is a shot of a child.
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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.
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Then Eliza got in the farm workshop, made the frame with the barbed wire, and then on the board below she added these words.
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From the poet George Santayana.
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Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Lee got it, sorry, Eliza got a very good mark in her GCSE exam.
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But best of all, a Holocaust survivor who visited the archives was really moved to see such a forceful work by one so young.
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I hope during this presentation you might feel you encountered my mum as well as some of her indelible images.
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I hope perhaps something of her spirit and her passion for peace and freedom and justice has come across to you.
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And if it sits well with you, please keep it.
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It's her gift and mine to you.
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And thank you for being such a wonderfully warm and friendly and supportive audience.
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It's been a tremendous pleasure to bring my mum here to meet you tonight.
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Thank you.
