I stumbled across a series of documentaries the other night which blew me away. I watched one after the other and stayed up way too late, but it was absolutely worth the sleep deprivation. The first documentary was on Lee Miller, so that is where I shall begin also...
After her death, her son discovered over 40,000 of her negatives in the attic after Miller had placed them there along with the acknowledgement that they existed. He was to find that she had been a great beauty and model for Vogue in the 30s and that she had embraced the Surrealist movement in Paris before becoming the only woman photographer of the second world war. Her photo journalism for Vogue captured the horrors of Dachau, the blitz of London and even getting caught up in the crossfire in Brittany. The photo below is from the years she spent with her Egyptian husband in North Africa when she began to experiment with her camera before the war. The photo above was taken in Hitler's bathtub, days after he committed suicide and was the culmination of her work.
Of course I knew of Lee Miller's work, but I'd never followed her story. The two are inseparable.
If anyone is interested, you can still catch the Annie Leibovitz segment on BBC4's website iPlayer. Don't miss it!
I also happened across those documentaries, the Lee Miller photographs were so powerful and sent chills up my spine. And Annie Liebowitz, what a life, and such focus, so absorbed in her world, not sure i could be so single minded. Both showed how important it is to become a master of your medium, and keep walking that path.
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