Antony Penrose – The Lee Miller Archive

The discovery of [Lee Miller's] boxes was really one of the most significant moments of my life.

Antony Penrose, Director of the Lee Miller Archive

Antony Penrose is the son of Lee Miller, a remarkable woman photographer at the forefront of fine art, fashion, and journalism at different points in her life. After her passing, Penrose began to preserve and catalogue Miller’s images after discovering many of her prints and negatives locked in an attic. As founder and director of the Lee Miller Archive, Antony Penrose has helped to ensure his mother’s legacy, which in turn has allowed it to be reevaluated by the world. Her photographs have now been exhibited internationally in many major museums, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Jeu De Paume in Paris, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. 

Below, you can listen and read along to Antony as he shares "one of the most significant moments" of his life. This profound and touching story recounts how a box of old photographs led him to discover an unknown facet of his mother's life. Again and again, we continue to hear so many wonderful stories where photography provides new opportunities for learning and reflection.

Learn More: Lee Miller in the War

Who was Lee Miller?

Lee Miller had a very exciting career. She started off as a fashion model for the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair, and then she went to Paris and she became the lover and a pupil and muse of Man Ray, and from him she learned photography herself. And she became a surrealist photographer and then she went back to New York, had her own studio there. She left that to marry an Egyptian and live in Egypt for nearly seven years, and then she went to Paris in 1937. And that was where she met Roland Penrose and that’s how I come into the story because he was my dad and they married in 1947.

But what’s happened in the meantime, because they had a whirlwind romance that developed into a long-term love affair, finally Lee Miller left her Egyptian husband and went to London. And that was just the moment the war broke out and this was a signal for Lee to become, first of all, a war correspondent, and she went to Europe hard on the heels of the American troops after D-Day. And there she became a combat photographer. And that really set the theme for the next 18 months of her life because she followed the troops right across Europe and she was actually witnessing the burning of Hitler’s house when the war ended. She was, at that time, in Bavaria.

So, she had an extraordinary career. But after the war, although she tried to continue as a fashion photographer, the spark and the excitement and the purpose were no longer there because she had regarded photography and her contribution to it as being a means of changing the course of world events, of contributing to the war and the downfall of Hitler. And certainly the brave new world that everybody had fought for was not delivered. And so she became very depressed and began a cycle of depression and alcohol abuse that really almost destroyed her. But she was actually too tough for that.

She continued photographing not for Vogue but just for her own sake, really, taking pictures of friends like Picasso and Joan Miró and Max Ernst, and others. But when she died in 1977, most people had forgotten about her as a photographer and she was really, by that time, better known for being a fantastically imaginative gourmet cook.

But the irony was that after she died, in the attic of her home we found these boxes and they contained a kind of time capsule, everything that I ever needed to know about Lee Miller, who I had not really known during the course of her life. And so with the help of others, including my late wife Suzanna, we reassembled this whole pile of negatives and stuff into an archive, and today, that’s what’s known as the Lee Miller Archive. We hold exhibitions and create books and films and other things of her work all over the world. And it’s greatly satisfying to me to find that she’s become so well-known internationally and has become a sort of inspiration for other photographers and young women and people of all walks of life.

What did it feel like when you first saw the boxes and started going through them?

The discovery of the boxes was really one of the most significant moments of my life. My late wife, Suzanna, went up into the attic and she came down with this bunch of papers and she said, “I think you should look at this.” And I sat on the stairs and I read it. And then I read it again, and then I read it again.

It was actually the manuscript of the “Siege of St. Malo,” which she had witnessed. And the prose was so incredible that I could not understand that this person who I had known during my life as, what I regarded really as a useless drunk, had written this incredibly compelling prose. And so I had to actually find out everything I could and it became for me a kind of mission to reconstruct Lee Miller through her work and get to know her, because I had not known her during her lifetime.

If you’re a kid, it’s very hard to know somebody who is an alcoholic parent and I had a completely different view of her to the one that I discovered through studying her work. I eventually wrote a biography of her which was published by Thames and Hudson and it’s still around, it’s still in print. It’s called The Lives of Lee Miller. And when it came out, it was reviewed. One reviewer very generously said that I had given the world a photographer the world had not known about and I thought, “Well, that’s very nice.” But actually, for me, the satisfaction was that I gave myself a mother that I hadn’t known about, and I thought that was a pretty good trade.

There was this paradox about her which is that, although she clearly did not place much value on her work, I think in some intuitive way—she was a very, very intuitive person—she kind of hoped or believed perhaps that one day, somebody would open the time capsule and perhaps study her work, and perhaps understand it for themselves, and perhaps then present the work to other people. And I hope this is what she’s intended because that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 25 years.

What’s it like to set up an archive, to go from the boxes to where you probably are today?

It’s a wonderful journey. It’s expensive, it’s demanding, it’s pernicious, it’s taken every cent of spare cash—not so much to spare, either. It’s taken every minute of my life. It’s actually become more and more demanding as time goes on. But it’s the most fantastically rewarding thing that I’ve done.

Lee never did much for me as a mum during her lifetime, but my God, she left me this time capsule, this incredible toy which I have just had the most enormous fun playing with. How else would I get to travel all over the world and meet wild and wonderful people and have this sort of privileged access to other collections? How on earth do you get to be involved with people from the V&A in London, or the Getty in America, or Museu Picasso in Barcelona? I mean, you just don’t walk in on that kind of a job.  You’ve got to either be very clever, which I’m not, or very lucky, which I am.

How many people come through the archive?

Well, we’re a very, very small outfit. We’re getting up to about a thousand a year now. There are two different kinds of tours—the extended tour, where people come for about three hours and they get taken around by Amy and myself, and then there’s the regular tour which is when you get taken around by Ros and Kerry Megabarn? and others, and that takes an hour. Tours are by booking only.