London present of Lee Miller pictures is fundraising to avoid wasting 1000’s of her negatives – The Art Newspaper

The Lee Miller Archives, which have been established after the American photographer’s huge assortment of pictures and writings have been found within the attic of her Sussex house following her dying in 1977, is elevating cash to supply pressing conservation of 1000’s of her negatives, a few of that are practically 100 years outdated.

Proceeds from the gross sales of works on present at Lyndsey Ingram gallery in London will make sure that as many as 60,000 negatives and prints—a few of them in a deadly state—might be frozen and preserved. Miller’s archive is saved at Farleys House in East Sussex the place she lived along with her husband, the artwork historian and Institute of Contemporary Arts co-founder Roland Penrose, from 1949 till her dying.

The exhibition, Lee Miller: Performance of a Lifetime (23 January-25 February), examines the pivotal function of theatre, staging and efficiency all through Miller’s follow—from her arrival in Paris in 1930 and her involvement with the Surrealists to the ultimate years of the Second World War, throughout which period Miller labored as a photojournalist. Prices begin at £3,800; a number of corresponding prints are additionally at present on present at Tate Britain as a part of a survey present.

Ami Bouhassane, Miller’s granddaughter who runs the Grade II-listed Farley’s House collectively along with her father Antony Penrose, tells The Art Newspaper how Miller’s trove was found within the attic by probability nearly 50 years in the past. “Just after I was born, my mum was looking for pictures of my dad as a baby and she went up into the attic, but instead of coming back down with baby pictures she found the contact sheets and manuscripts from the Siege of Saint-Malo.” It was the primary fight battle that Miller lined as one of many first feminine conflict correspondents, masking the battle for Vogue and Life magazines.

“She never talked about her career,” Bouhassane says. “My dad had no idea. He knew that she’d been a photographer, that she could take good pictures and that she’d been a model, but he had no idea at what level, and he had absolutely no idea about what she’d done during the war.” The second Miller’s work was found, Penrose resolved to determine her archive.

Miller’s frontline conflict experiences, together with witnessing the liberation of the Dachau and Buchenwald focus camps, and her subsequent post-traumatic stress dysfunction when she returned house are properly documented. “After the war, Lee really struggled to come back and be a fashion photographer, to get excited about hats and handbags after everything she’d seen,” Bouhassane explains. “She had PTSD and she suffered from post-natal depression. But the attitude was to ‘put up and shut up’. She drank for a bit because that was the only accepted way of dealing with it.”

Working as a photojournalist after the conflict additionally proved troublesome, so when Miller and Penrose moved from London to Farleys in 1949 she boxed up all her negatives and prints, by no means to unpack them. Despite this, Bouhassane thinks part of Miller remained connected to her work. “It would have been a hell of a lot easier to make a massive bonfire and burn it all,” she says. “So even though Lee turned her back on photojournalism and art photography, on some level she felt that she didn’t want to part with it and that’s why she left it in the attic.”

Bouhassane remembers how, when she began working for the archive 26 years in the past, Miller’s work was “valued at pennies” and he or she and her father needed to struggle to get recognition for the photographer. “I used to pitch shows with my dad, and we’d have to play this game where you’re trying to appeal to somebody to give you a Lee Miller exhibition so you just name drop all the 20th-century male artists she’d photographed or had affairs with and then we’d get a show. It’s only in the last 12 years that she has got shows in her own right, and the fact that she’s a woman is not such an issue.”

The archive is now working with the Preus Museum in Norway, which specialises in pictures and preserves their negatives by freezing them. “It’s really the only way that you can stop them from degrading completely,” Bouhassane says. “Luckily can do it in a domestic freezer, but it’s now a matter of finding space for all the freezers we will need.”

First, there are plans to digitise the archive, although the method might be decided by how a lot funding the organisation can increase. The Lee Miller Archive is represented in Europe by CLAIR gallery in Switzerland and works on a case-by-case foundation with different galleries. The collaboration with Lyndsey Ingram got here through the curator Clara Zevi, the founder and director of Artists Support, an initiative that helps artists and estates increase cash.

As Zevi factors out, the long-term purpose is to flip Farleys House from a enterprise right into a charity to safe Miller’s legacy. “It’s such a special place, it’s not your regular house museum because you really feel that it was lived in and that a lot of fun was had there too. Ami and her father have done such a beautiful job conserving both the work and the story in that house.”

Bouhassane acknowledges relinquishing management of the archive “will be a big thing”. But, she provides, “we have done a lot of soul searching and feel this is the best way to be able to make sure that Farleys remains accessible. We’re always trying to look towards Lee’s legacy. It was so hard to get her recognised, it would be a shame if there was nothing left for future generations.”