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Every photographer who’s ever handed movie to a lab tech should have questioned what the individual on the opposite aspect of the darkroom door makes of it. Roland Haupt not solely fashioned a view, he stored the very best prints for himself.
Haupt labored as a darkroom printer within the London workplace of Vogue journal from the early Nineteen Forties, processing work for 2 of the period’s most celebrated photographers, Lee Miller and Sir Cecil Beaton. In doing so, he occupied one of the crucial privileged positions within the historical past of pictures: the primary individual outdoors the sphere to see the photographs as they emerged from the developer, contemporary from the frontlines of the Second World War.
The album he assembled from these years, referred to as the Miller-Beaton scrapbook, has now been acquired by the Bodleian Libraries on the University of Oxford, making its first-ever look in a public assortment. Spanning 1943 to 1949, it seems to be a outstanding file, not simply of wartime historical past, however of the working relationship between a photographer and the one that transforms negatives into prints.
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A printer’s eye
Back in 1940, Miller—just lately portrayed in a biopic by Kate Winslet—trained Haupt to take over darkroom production while she went to work as a war correspondent, following the US army through France and into Germany.
The result is an album with an unusual provenance: the prints were selected by the technician who processed every frame, choosing his favourites from images arriving by courier directly from the front. It is, in short, his personal edit of some of the most consequential photography of the 20th century.
Among the images is an alternate version of David E. Scherman’s iconic photograph of Miller bathing in Hitler’s personal bathtub in Munich, one of the most reproduced photographs of the war. The album’s version is previously unpublished, as are a number of other prints.
The collection also includes two SS officers photographed shortly after their capture, images from the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald and, in arresting contrast, Miller in animated conversation with Pablo Picasso in a Paris studio.
From frontline to front row
One of the album’s great fascinations is the collision it creates between war reportage and fashion photography. Several spreads document the Paris couture collections photographed shortly after the Liberation: models in extraordinary hats and draped suits, in the same cool black and white as the concentration camp images from weeks earlier. The juxtaposition is far from comfortable, but it is honest. This is what Vogue was, and what its photographers were asked to document.
Beaton’s contribution covers his wartime work in North Africa and the Middle East, alongside London portraits and theatre set photography developed by Haupt back in the Vogue darkroom. The album also includes portraits of Noël Coward, Vivien Leigh, Marlene Dietrich and Henry Moore, as well as a photograph of Mrs Churchill at No. 10 Downing Street, giving the whole thing the quality of an extraordinarily well-connected contact sheet.
Why this matters now
The acquisition follows renewed public interest in Miller’s work after a major retrospective at Tate Britain. The Bodleian will conserve and catalogue the album before making it available to researchers, with longer-term plans for public display.
What strikes me today, looking through these images, is how much editorial intelligence went into this selection. Haupt was not a passive technician: he understood what he was looking at, he responded to it, and he curated it with genuine taste.
The album is, in short, a reminder how in the 20th century, photography was rarely a purely solo act. Someone always had to make the prints.
The Miller-Beaton scrapbook is now part of the Bodleian Libraries collections at the University of Oxford. Members of the public can explore the collections via digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk or by visiting the exhibition galleries within the Bodleian’s Weston Library. For extra info, go to bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
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