{"id":241861,"date":"2026-01-20T03:27:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T03:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/241861\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T03:27:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T03:27:10","slug":"london-show-of-lee-miller-photographs-is-fundraising-to-save-thousands-of-her-negatives-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/241861\/","title":{"rendered":"London show of Lee Miller photographs is fundraising to save thousands of her negatives – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Lee Miller Archives, which were established after the American photographer\u2019s vast collection of photographs and writings were discovered in the attic of her Sussex home following her death in 1977, is raising money to provide urgent conservation of thousands of her negatives, some of which are nearly 100 years old.<\/p>\n

Proceeds from the sales of works on show at Lyndsey Ingram gallery in London will ensure that as many as 60,000 negatives and prints\u2014some of them in a perilous state\u2014will be frozen and preserved. Miller\u2019s archive is stored at Farleys House in East Sussex where she lived with her husband, the art historian and Institute of Contemporary Arts co-founder Roland Penrose, from 1949 until her death.<\/p>\n

The exhibition, Lee Miller: Performance of a Lifetime<\/a>\u00a0(23 January-25 February), examines the pivotal role of theatre, staging and performance throughout Miller\u2019s practice\u2014from her arrival in Paris in 1929 and her involvement with the Surrealists to the final years of the Second World War, during which time Miller worked as a photojournalist. Prices start at \u00a33,800; several corresponding prints are also currently on show at Tate Britain as part of a survey show.<\/p>\n

Ami Bouhassane, Miller\u2019s granddaughter who runs the Grade II-listed Farleys House together with her father Antony Penrose, tells The Art Newspaper how Miller\u2019s trove was discovered in the attic by chance almost 50 years ago. \u201cJust 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.\u201d It was the first combat battle that Miller covered as one of the first female war correspondents, covering the conflict for Vogue and Life magazines.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only in the last 12 years that she has got shows in her own right, and the fact that she\u2019s a woman is not such an issue <\/p>\n

Ami Bouhassane, Miller\u2019s granddaughter<\/p>\n

\u201cShe never talked about her career,\u201d Bouhassane says. \u201cMy dad had no idea. He knew that she\u2019d been a photographer, that she could take good pictures and that she\u2019d been a model, but he had no idea at what level, and he had absolutely no idea about what she\u2019d done during the war.\u201d The moment Miller\u2019s work was discovered, Penrose resolved to establish her archive.<\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s frontline war experiences, including witnessing the liberation of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, and her subsequent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when she returned home are well documented. \u201cAfter the war, Lee really struggled to come back and be a fashion photographer, to get excited about hats and handbags after everything she\u2019d seen,\u201d Bouhassane explains. \u201cShe had PTSD and she suffered from post-natal depression. But the attitude was to \u2018put up and shut up\u2019. She drank for a bit because that was the only accepted way of dealing with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lee Miller, Untitled Nude back (thought to be Noma Rathner), Paris (1930) \u00a9 leemiller.co.uk<\/p>\n

Working as a photojournalist after the war also proved difficult, so when Miller and Penrose moved from London to Farleys in 1949 she boxed up all her negatives and prints, never to unpack them. Despite this, Bouhassane thinks a part of Miller remained attached to her work. \u201cIt would have been a hell of a lot easier to make a massive bonfire and burn it all,\u201d she says. \u201cSo even though Lee turned her back on photojournalism and art photography, on some level she felt that she didn\u2019t want to part with it and that\u2019s why she left it in the attic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bouhassane recalls how, when she started working for the archive 26 years ago, Miller\u2019s work was \u201cvalued at pennies\u201d, and she and her father had to fight to get recognition for the photographer. \u201cI used to pitch shows with my dad, and we\u2019d have to play this game where you\u2019re trying to appeal to somebody to give you a Lee Miller exhibition, so you just name drop all the 20th-century male artists she\u2019d photographed or had affairs with, and then we\u2019d get a show. It\u2019s only in the last 12 years that she has got shows in her own right, and the fact that she\u2019s a woman is not such an issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

The archive is now working with the Preus Museum in Norway, which specialises in photography and preserves their negatives by freezing them. \u201cIt\u2019s really the only way that you can stop them from degrading completely,\u201d Bouhassane says. \u201cLuckily, you can do it in a domestic freezer, but it\u2019s now a matter of finding space for all the freezers we will need.\u201d<\/p>\n

First, there are plans to digitise the archive, though the process will be determined by how much funding the organisation can raise. The Lee Miller Archives is represented in Europe by CLAIR gallery in Switzerland and works on a case-by-case basis with other galleries. The collaboration with Ingram came via the curator Clara Zevi, the founder and director of Artists Support<\/a>, an initiative that helps artists and estates raise money.<\/p>\n

As Zevi points out, the long-term goal is to\u00a0turn Farleys House from a business into a charity to secure Miller\u2019s legacy. \u201cIt\u2019s such a special place; it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bouhassane acknowledges relinquishing control of the archive \u201cwill be a big thing\u201d. But, she adds, \u201cwe 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\u2019re always trying to look towards Lee\u2019s legacy. It was so hard to get her recognised, it would be a shame if there was nothing left for future generations.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Lee Miller Archives, which were established after the American photographer\u2019s vast collection of photographs and writings were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241862,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[16823,442,498,499,500,26140,501,156,44415,111,139,69,5296],"class_list":{"0":"post-241861","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art-market","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-artsdesign","13":"tag-commercial-galleries","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-lee-miller","17":"tag-new-zealand","18":"tag-newzealand","19":"tag-nz","20":"tag-photography"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}