Antony Penrose Discusses Photographer Lee Miller: Photographs and Stories

Book covers of Lee Miller's work - "The Lives of Lee Miller" and "Lee Miller's War"

Who is Lee Miller?

To say that Lee Miller had a complicated career may be an understatement. She began a modeling career in New York, then moved to Paris to work with surrealist Man Ray before starting her own photography studio. She began by taking street photos and portraits, but later she became at war correspondent in World War II. After the war, she continued to photograph for Vogue, who had published her war images.

Click here to view biographical information on Lee Miller

Why this is important:

Antony Penrose tells a deeply personal story of childhood only knowing his mother as a depressed alcoholic. After her passing, he discovered the vibrant, interesting and respected mother he never knew existed. Discovering her photographic archives, writings and ephemera transformed his life.

How you can use this information:   

Going through the photographs and ephemera of someone who has passed on can be a way to reframe your views, feel closer, and learn a lot more about the person. You can then also share this knowledge and wisdom with others. In his case he created an archive whose photos and stories have been shared in books and exhibited in the world’s most important museums.

View the Lee Miller Collection here

Harry Ransom Center – Curator Roy Flukinger Shares a Memorable Photo from the Archives

Click here to view the photograph discussed by Roy Flukinger

Why this is important:

Curator Roy Flukinger from the Harry Ransom Center tells an interesting little story about the work of curators and his favorite older photo of bathing beauties with a range of different types of umbrellas. It’s one of the most popular photos from the vast Ransom Center’s archives. He tells of different perspectives of why people like it.

How you can use this information:

This is a terrific example how people see photographs differently based on varying interests and perspectives. It’s an important lesson as well as an interesting and telling conservation starter to ask different people what they see in an image.

Among the images in our photographic collection is a panorama, done in 1922 by a panoramic photographer in Texas, you may have heard of him and you may not have, his name was E.O. GOLDBECK. He specialized in these large, Cirkut panoramic photographs. This panorama is of a bathing-girl review in Galveston, Texas in 1922 and in the picture we have some 40 ladies in their homemade swimsuits in a bathing-beauty competition on the beaches in Galveston. He lined them all up in a row and took them with a circuit camera, which panned around to include all of them and then he would sell the picture commercially, to them, or other interested people. Flash ahead from the year 1922 to the present day. This image is now over 80 years old. It has a marvelous nostalgia about it, the quaint pictures of the young ladies at the time, some of them very elderly now, but still having memories of a bathing-girl pageant they were in in Galveston, and the crowds there, and the fact that it was an event, and here it is documented in a photograph. It’s a charming image, and I think charming is a good word for it. It’s also one of our most popular images people love to buy prints of it and just hang it on their wall. It’s never been considered high art, and Goldbeck would laugh at the thought of it being high art per se. But it has significant cultural and emotional content.

One day in the 1980s a gentleman came in and was doing research in the collection and found this picture and fell in love with it and ordered three copies, and we thought, “Aha, he loves the nostalgic value; he loves it for the same reason we all love it and like it so much.” But no. It turned out that he was a historian of umbrellas, and in that picture, the ladies are holding 19 different styles of parasols and umbrellas, according to this umbrella historian.

Now, here’s a picture we’ve all brought our own feelings or emotional state to, but suddenly, someone sees it for an entirely different reason. They’ve brought their own experience, their own taste, their own level of emotional and intellectual experience to it. That impacts their view of it – and, perhaps most significantly, it impacts our view of it. I can’t look at that picture the same way again, because my life has changed a little bit. Maybe not culturally, socially and economically, but it’s changed. Someone has shared their knowledge, their experience with me of something that I’ve seen, and I see it a little differently now, too.

--

And if I told you the story or told the next person the story and they see the picture, they won’t see it in exactly the same way either. They may bring something else to it -- maybe they’d notice the shoes, or the costumes, or I don’t know, or the weather or the architecture around the ladies.  But everybody brings something to a photograph. And if we can get ‘em to share that, to share that experience, we’ve enriched everybody; and we’ve made them just a little stronger and a little better, period, That’s what we do with photographs.  I know that this is a quaint and somewhat prosaic example, but it happens every day in our collections with people working with all sorts of images in all sorts of ways

Importance of the Historical Photographs of Charleston Photographer George Johnson 

Click here to view photographs from photographer George Johnson

Why this is important:

In a conversation with PhotoWings and the South Carolina Historical Society, Danny Crooks tells the story of saving old 1800’s glass photographic plates from the flea market. One of the historians from the South Carolina Historical Society explains why they are so unique and important.

How you can use this information:

If you come upon an old archive at risk, consider how it might be saved and utilized. Old photographs can be used for a number of uses — memory, education, restoring architecture, cultural studies, as an inspirational creative tool in design, as well as visual pleasure.

Danny Crooks signs copies of his book, "On the Eve of the Charleston Renaissance: The George W. Johnson Photographs"

Photowings sat down for an interview with a few George Johnson Enthusiasts:

Jane Aldrich, the Archivist of the South Carolina Historical Society

Mike Coker, the Visiual Materials Curator for the South Carolina Historical Society

Danny Crooks, a Charleston tour guide, and author of On the Eve of the Charleston Renaissance

Cover image for 'On the Eve of the Charleston Renaissance: The George W. Johnson Photographs'

In this audio clip, Danny Crooks tells his story of finding and acquiring George W. Johnson's photographs

In this clip, Coker, Crooks and Aldrich describe Johnson's career as a hobby photographer and the niche that Johnson's photographs have made for themselves in history. They talk about the interactions between communities in the racially divided 1890's Charleston:

In this clip, Mike Coker discusses an unexpected use of photographs in the Johnson Archive. Jane Aldrich chimes in to describe the good fortune that George W. Johnson's photographs have survived as they have.

Psychologist Phillip Zimbardo's Perspective – A Poignant Story of Sicillian Culture 

Why this is important:

Psychologist Phil Zimbardo tells a sweet and telling story of Sicilians ritually visiting the gravesites of relatives and talking to the photographic likenesses of their loved ones on the gravestones.

How you can use this information:

Photographs have a power to bring people to life again in a tangible and magical manner. Memory and people’s desire to connect is a powerful force — keeping photographs of loved ones is a way to keep them alive in one’s memory.