The Lives Of Lee Miller - Antony Penrose

 THE LIVES OF LEE MILLER - ANTONY PENROSE

To the casual observer it's just a black-and-white photograph of a woman in a bath but with everything in life, context is all. Look closer and you'll see the muddied bathmat from the discarded combat boots and propped-up on the side of the bath you'll see the framed photograph of none other than Adolf Hitler. The woman in the bath is Lee Miller and the bathtub she is in is actually Hitler's very own. For further context, it's Munich 1945 and the dying days of World War Two. Hitler has fled Munich for his Berlin bunker and his house at Prinzregentenplatz 27 has been billeted by a Division of American troops who the next day would be heading to Hitler's Alpine fortress at Berchtesgaden, and Lee would be accompanying them.

The previous day, Lee had been among the first to enter Dachau concentration camp on it being liberated and so was one of the first to bear witness to the horrors there. Alongside photos she had taken as evidence she had cabled her editor back in England the words 'I implore you to believe this is true'.

Lee Miller was a photographer whose style and eye for a picture had very much been influenced by Man Ray and the French Surrealists, and this - The Lives Of Lee Miller, by Antony Penrose - is the story of her life. Or rather, as the title says, the story of her lives because Lee more than most lived many.

It's an interesting idea, of course, and one I understand and agree with, as in you don't live just one life - you live many lives. It's an idea that only makes sense as you grow older and you have a past to look back on though it has very little to do with age. Childhood, teenage and adulthood are but different phases of the same body but the lives you live during those phases are the real markers. They are the stuff of dreams of which Shakespeare wrote and like snowflakes, no two dreams are the same.

By all accounts and by all the evidence, Lee Miller was a remarkable woman. Not only was she a photographer but at various times also a war correspondent, a fashion model, a writer, a traveller, and a chef. More than anything else, however, she was formidable. At times she may well have come across as being brash but being uniquely talented prevented her from crossing over into the realm of entitlement or even insufferability. Moreover, when dealing with the likes of Pablo Picasso and Cecil Beaton a certain amount of brashness would probably have been required and similarly, timidity is not going to allow you to nap in Eva Braun's bed, which Lee also did.

From fashion model to war correspondent is quite some leap but it's the fact that it was done under the auspice of Vogue magazine that made it all so doubly unusual. Lee had at first been sent to Europe by Vogue to cover and photograph 'fashion under siege' and nurses working in war zones but what she ended up reporting back to their London office on was the reality of war captured in brilliantly shot, black-and-white photographs and beautifully composed prose.

The Vogue editors were astonished because of course they were the last people anyone would expect to run such articles. The frivolousness of fashion had suddenly been joined with the seriousness of war.

World War Two was the making of Lee but it was also, in a way, her undoing. After you have lived in the white heat of battle and not only stared mankind's inhumanity in the eye but also got it to sit and pose for a photo, where is there left to go? What is there left to do?

'I get so depressed,' she confided to her doctor friend who replied with a stern 'We cannot keep the world permanently at war just to provide you with excitement'.  So, Lee effectively retired from photography and returned to live in England whereupon she became a mother and a world-famous gourmet chef. As you do.

The author of The Lives Of Lee Miller - Antony Penrose - is actually Lee's son, so when it came to research and access to archives this would obviously have made things easier. He's featured in the book, of course, though not prominently and when his presence is required he writes of himself in the third person. An interesting thing is come the end of the book it's clear that he understands his mother a lot more than he did when she was alive and in so doing helps us understand her also, shining a whole new light upon her multiple, multifaceted and multifarious lives.

The Lives Of Lee Miller is fascinating but then given the subject matter - how could it not be?

John Serpico