AN ALBUM: A DAYBOOK WITH WORKS BY LEE MILLER, CECIL BEATON AND THEIR ASSISTANT ROLAND HAUPT

Over the past 35 years, the Michael Hoppen Gallery has had the privilege of working with some of the most extraordinary pieces of photographic history from the expansive and eclectic diaspora that photographic practice covers. This has made our job fascinating and full of wonder. It is heartening to know that these special pieces can still appear when one least expects it, and reinforces my belief that there are important, and as-yet undiscovered photographic gems out there still waiting to be revealed.

A recent discovery is an extraordinary album of photographs by the illustrious photographers Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton. It is possibly one of the most important albums of 20^thc. photography to come to light in recent years and is a visceral visual reminder of the most turbulent period of the 20^th century.

The album begins with this brief and heartfelt introduction by its originator – Roland Haupt, who sets the scene perfectly:

…This is the story of my favourite photographer Lee Miller – Vogue war correspondent who followed the American army from the beaches of Normandy, 5 days after D-Day, up to the final entry into Berlin and after that she continued her journey visiting countries that had been occupied, having many exciting experiences – here are a few of the beautiful pictures she sent back…

The album, which is ostensibly a daybook or scrap book kept by their assistant, Roland Haupt, provides an empirical time capsule of this fast moving, dangerous and seminal period at the end of the WWII. Many of the seismic moments that Lee Miller witnessed and photographed so professionally, are here - from the surrender of the German army to American forces, the harrowing evidence she captured in Dachau and Buchenwald, and an unpublished version of Lee in Hitlers bathtub, taken by David E. Scherman, who she in turn photographed in the bath too. There are strangely banal and unknown photographs of Hitlers bedroom with his unmade bed (Lee had spent the night in it) and his rather ordinary living room and desk. These ‘innocent’ images however produce a chilling and unsettling realisation when one realises whose home we are looking at. Miller observed that:

… ‘Hitler had never really been alive for me until to-day. He'd been an evil-machine-monster all these years, until I bathed ate and slept in his house. He became less fabulous and therefore more terrible’…

The following section of this unique album is populated with beautifully perfect photographs by Cecil Beaton, many taken in North Africa, where Beaton was stationed towards the end of the war. His pictures show a more restrained and composed method of documenting what he saw. There is none of the horror of Europe - which so compelled Lee - to be found in Beaton’s photographs.

In 1942, Beaton had travelled to North Africa. where he produced some of his most dramatic abstract studies focusing on the detritus of war in the dry endless desert landscape, which he described as surreal. Beaton did also record the hardships and physical extremes experienced by the troops, just as he registered the sometimes sublime beauty of the desert.

Scattered through the album, are other pictures taken by Beaton in London and of Beaton himself– possibly by Haupt, and as any day book would have, a haphazard cornucopia of mixed portraits, theatre sets and newspaper cuttings of the day showing his images used in the press.

Later in the album, where we find numerous images by the three photographers. There is an extraordinary print of a semi-naked Lee Miller with a plaster cast of her exposed torso, possibly made by her husband Roland Penrose, upended over her head. Penrose had photographed the cast being made on her body and was in keeping with their exposure and fascination with the surrealists movement in Paris before the war.

Amongst the album’s other crowded pages are photographs by Miller of firing squads, scenes of despair and grief around the camps. Jumping out of one of the pages is a desperate image of a pair of young SS guards, captured, beaten and tied-up in the back of a van staring directly into her lens. Miller's writing about the beaten guards was brief and offhand, suggesting that she found it difficult to put her feelings into words:

….’What is the nature of justice - and what the role of vengeance - in the aftermath of atrocity? And how is it possible to go on living in the world, with the full knowledge of humanity's capacity for evil?’….

Amongst some of the highly charged photographs, are other more traditional and gentler images which share a strange kind of classical beauty contrasting against the stark late winter war ravaged landscapes. A plethora of fashion pictures by Miller showing models resting during a fashion shoot - juxtaposed with war photographs - are easily mistaken for ‘bodies’ that she photographed after suicides or as casualties of war.

It is through this ability of her fluent and intuitive visual language, that Miller was able to make pictures of the horrors of war, of fashion, views and landscapes and of personalities with such professionalism, and moreover, with such a razor-sharp point of view. It is understandable how her integrity and image-making ability came to mean so much to all those who worked with her. She clearly knew how important her witnessing of the history that unfolded in front of her was, and that she had to make these difficult pictures to inform the world of an uncomfortable truth.

Populating some of the other more general album pages, are portraits of many distinguished and influential luminaries of the day, whose lives were intertwined during the war years through art, politics, literature, music and theatre. Picasso, Marlene Dietrich, Fed Astair, Noel Coward, Mervyn Peake, Bob Hope, Clifford Coffin, Margaret Bourke-White and many others are there.

This day book was started in 1943, and was printed and assembled by Roland Haupt. Lee Miller was an excellent photographic printer herself, and she learned some of her technique from Man Ray who she lived with in Paris with whom she grew fascinated by what was achievable with photography. She printed all her own work and some of Man Ray’s in her Paris days, and to begin with in her New York studio, where she then trained her brother Erik Miller to be her assistant and to take over the darkroom work under her supervision.

In Egypt, she used commercial processing, but it is probable that she took a firm role in supervising the making of the enlargements she had made, some of which were published and exhibited at the time.

During the London Vogue studio days in 1940 she at first found herself back in the darkroom, but she managed to train and encourage her assistant Roland Haupt to the point where he did all the routine work.

Haupt was tasked as the photographic assistant to Cecil Beaton too during the war years. He processed and printed many of their most important and celebrated works, made for Vogue and Bazaar. Haupt was often entrusted with their precious rolls of film. Lee would send the shot film to Haupt in the UK via an army courier which he would then process, contact and print in his small darkroom, and then, forward them onto Vogue.

Anyone who has processed film in a darkroom will know that that mishaps can occur, such as Capa’s Normandy D-Day landing film which famously suffered from over drying after processing in the LIFE darkrooms. There is always that moment-of-truth when the lights are turned on and you see if you have what you expected to be recorded on the film without fogging or other light or processing trauma issues. 120 format film, which is what Miller shot, is notably more difficult to process than 35 mm.

The album contains some of the very first prints made of Lee Miller’s most celebrated images (and some previously unknown ones, too). It is important that these pages are never separated, as they stand as a testament not only to this significant period in history but also to Lee Miller’s and her colleagues’ undeniable bravery and talent.