“Lee Miller’s Camera Became a Weapon of Choice”

A New York model for Vogue, a muse of Man Ray, a Parisian surrealist photographer, a close friend of the great artists of her time, a war reporter: the epic life of Lee Miller (1907-1977) needs no introduction.

The exhibition “Lee Miller, Saint-Malo under siege, August 1944”, on view in France, retraces in texts and images a little-known part of her career, her deafening, and the surreal and human account of the siege of the Saint-Malo city produced for the British edition of the magazine Vogue. This story is the very first discovered by his son Anthony Penrose, who is now 77 years old. These are the first lines of a hidden life that he discovered some time after the death of his mother.

60,000 negatives, 20,000 original prints, letters, articles… A whole past hidden in the family attic. “At that moment, my life changed. It was 47 years ago,” recalls Anthony Penrose, moved, now reconciled with a mother who was absent during her lifetime and consumed by her ghosts, and of which he knew nothing. Accompanied by his daughter, Amy Bouhassane, he dedicated his life to the recognition of his mother’s work and couldn’t hide his emotion while seeing her photos exhibited in Saint-Malo, a city to which she was very attached. Blind met him in on this occasion.

How do you feel seeing the photos from your mother’s reportage exhibited in the city of Saint-Malo, 80 years later?

This is a moment of very great happiness and satisfaction. It’s a very deep feeling. There’s something else here, this is kind of like a connection between the soul of Lee Miller and the soul of Saint-Malo. It’s like they’re reunited, and that’s very important to me.

Would Lee Miller have liked to see her photos exhibited in Saint-Malo?

She would be, because she wants people to not forget the value of freedom and liberty. She wanted to be the storyteller. She wanted to bring important messages. 

What is so special between Lee Miller and this city, and France?

It was the last town that she left on 1st September 1939, and, the first notable town when she came back in August 1944. She’d been to France before. And I think that was really important to her. She wanted to be part of this liberation and to tell the world how incredibly brave and tenacious the Allies were and the free French and everybody, and how this tremendous effort was going on to kick the Germans out.

Saint-Malo is also a very special city for you, because the reportage from Saint-Malo is the first story of your mother that you discovered. Tell us about it… 

(Anthony Penrose reads in French an extract from the report on the siege of Saint-Malo written by Lee Miller for Vogue UK) “Machine gun fire belched from the end pillbox – the men fell flat – stumbling and crawling into the shelter of shell holes – some crept on, others sweeping back to the left of the guns’ angle, one man reaching the top…” I read that, and I thought, “who wrote this?” I thought maybe it would be some really important Vogue journalist. And so I read some more, and then I put it all back into order and put the pages, and I read it again. I took it to my father, and I said, “what do you know about this?” He went and he found an old copy of Vogue, and there it was, the siege of Saint-Malo. I didn’t know it at the time, but in that moment, my life changed. That was 47 years ago. Saint-Malo, because of that and because of many other things, has always been a very, very important part of my research and my journey.

During the war, Lee Miller was on the front line in Saint-Malo, while women were banned from covering the battlefields. How do you explain this?

Lucky accident. She had landed on Omaha Beach (August 12, 1944), the military had said to her that it was clear, because at that moment, they’d captured the town of Saint-Malo. But they hadn’t taken the fortresses. That was just a piece of miscommunication, because when she got here, there was still this pitch battle for the next five days to dislodge the Germans from the fortresses (from August 13 to 17).

She seems to have been part of the GI’s…

One of the extraordinary things about her is that she wasn’t trained in combat at all. She just had to learn on the job from, like, that. She became very good at it. There was one guy who told me that she was. This was John Phillips. He was a Life magazine guy. He said that Lee Miller was “the bravest person I ever knew. She was the one we always wanted to be with when things went bad, because she never panicked. She always had a plan, and she usually had whiskey and cigarettes”. 

What kind of photographer was she?

First of all, she was a model for Vogue in America. We would call her a supermodel today. The next thing that happened was that she wanted to become a photographer. She said famously, “I would rather take a picture than be one”. And so she went to Paris to find Man Ray, and she became a kind of a surrealist photographer, but that didn’t pay bills. So she became a fashion photographer. When she arrived in London in 1939, she went to work for Vogue.

She wanted to fight the Nazis because so many of her friends were still in France. Her dearest friends, like Paul Eluard, would be in terrible danger. So her camera became a weapon of choice. She started photographing the military in Britain. And then she wanted to get into Europe. With America in the war, she could become a war correspondent. The British wouldn’t have women war correspondents, but the Americans did. And that was the opening. A great motivation for her being here was to do whatever she could to help free her friends. 

How do you explain that her work has been forgotten for such a long time?

Because she was a woman, and they never regarded women as ever having done anything useful or important. I went to a very, very important museum in the United States. We had just had a big show in London, and I thought, okay, let me try out America. So I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the curator of photography only saw me, because my father’s name was important in the world of art. And I walked in and he said, Lee Miller is just a footnote to the history of Man Ray. She is of no interest to us at all. She’s not important. That was 1985. 

You dedicated your life to the memory of Lee Miller. Are you now reconciled with your mother who was absent during your childhood?

After the war, she was very badly damaged by PTSD. She became depressed. She became an alcoholic. And for the first 20 years of my life, we fought like crazy. Then we made friends just before she died. But I still didn’t know her. I had no understanding of her at all. And then when we started digging this out and I began researching for my book, the lives of Lee Miller, then it was incredible, because I found out so much about her. Writing about the lives of Lee Miller was cathartic because I realized how much I had missed and how much I misunderstood her and judged her wrongly. It was a really deeply upsetting time. I put together her in her life, and it was astonishing for my father because she hadn’t told him half of what had happened. 

Why ?

We learned that she deliberately didn’t tell him because she was afraid he might worry about her. To protect him. And, you know, so we. He and I found this very moving because we really felt that we wished we’d known her better. And if we had known her better, we would have been able to understand her more and recognize that she was suffering so much and maybe do more to help her. But as it was, no, she was just a living, drunken, useless person, and I missed understanding what was really important to her.

This is characteristic of people with PTSD, is that they find there are trigger moments and they avoid them. And of course, one of the things that she had learned very young, at the age of seven, she was raped and infected with gonorrhea. And the family closed ranks and made it a complete and total secret. She didn’t even tell my father. She didn’t tell her closest friends. She told nobody. I only found out. It was a moment when I really understood or began to understand her, because she lived her life keeping really big events secret, suppressing trauma. And that’s exactly what she did with this. She just suppressed it, kept it secret. Never told anybody. In all the time I knew her, she never talked about the war.

Even about the extermination camps?

I questioned, “did they really exist?” And she said, “yes, they did”. And she said she knew people who died in them. Maybe in that moment she was referring to how many jewish friends the people in the fashion were. “Les petites mains”, the seamstresses were gone. She didn’t know where they were going. And, you know, when you’re confronted with the horror of that sight and you already know how to recover these things, then that’s what you do and you don’t share it with anybody. And of course, it deprives us of the understanding of her.

What motivates you to continue?

What motivates me? This is a story that needs to be told. But I like the effect it has on people. Many times I have had young women come to me and say, “the life of Lee Miller has inspired me. I have gone and become a photographer. I have gone and become writer. I have gone and become an artist. She inspired me to change my life, to move forward, to dump bad relationships, to just take the courage to follow her own talents and so on”. And I would say this probably happens maybe three, four times a year. And I love that. I realize that actually, Lee is out there and she’s working and she’s helping people have better and more interesting, more creative lives. It’s a universal story. 

A beautiful story of transmission with your daughter…

What’s so wonderful for me is that she is so part of all of this, and it’s like it’s in. It is in her blood, but she really understands it. She’s very articulate. She’s incredibly industrious. This wouldn’t have happened without her.

What can you tell us about the upcoming film starring Kate Winslet as Lee Miller?

I’ve been working on it for ten years. Kate Winslet came and practically lived at the archive for weeks and she was just so focused on the research. And I can understand why when I see her on the screen, it is as though she really is Lee Miller for real. And, you know, and she was determined to make it authentic.

Can Lee Miller be considered as a feminist icon?

It is a feminist icon without being one. If you’d asked her “are you a feminist?” She probably said : “No, I’m a surrealist!”.

• “Lee Miller, Saint-Malo under siege, August 1944” in on view until September 29, 2024 at Chapelle de la Victoire, rue de la Victoire (intra-muros), in Saint-Malo, France. Entry price: 6 euros.

• The film Lee, starring Kate Winslet, Andy Samberg and Marion Cotillard, traces Lee Miller’s life as a war reporter. Theatrical release October 2024.