Photography - Jan Morris is unmoved by a collection of portraits lacking the "flash of poetry"
The truth is, I don't know what to say about this exhibition and its accompanying book Lee Miller: portraits from a life. The text to this handsome book is beautifully written by Richard Calvocoressi, a scholarly admirer who knows far more about photography than I do, and infinitely more about Lee Miller. But I find that the pictures don't bore me, excite me, repel me, charm me, intrigue me or even just leave me cold. They seem to envelop me in a sort of emotional vacuum, and that is hard to put into words.
Miller began life as a model in New York in the 1920s, then went to Paris where she became Man Ray's lover and pupil, and developed, so we are told, into "a witty surrealist photographer". To Cairo next with an Egyptian husband, years with Vogue picturing fashions and celebrities, a campaign photographer in Europe during the Second World War and last days on a farm in Sussex as wife of the English artistic guru Roland Penrose. She was beautiful (and was said to have been sexually abused in childhood), she knew everybody, she photographed eminences from T S Eliot to Queen Helen of Romania, and she was one of the first to enter the liberated concentration camp of Dachau.
A remarkable life, full of drama and (I assume) private passion. How is it then that this portfolio of her work seems to me so bloodless, even so lifeless? I have always had philistine doubts about photography as an art form, but I have never denied its powers of stimulation and evocation. Edward Steichen's portraits and Ansel Adams's landscapes have often moved me, I have been truly exhilarated by the high-spirited Harry Benson, vastly entertained by Weegee, perturbed by Bill Brandt, saddened by Capa and McCullin and touched even by the whimsy of old Cecil Beaton, but Miller's vision seems to me at once numbed and numbing. I somehow expected to read that her life had ended in tragic violence; but no, she died like anyone else, of cancer, aged 70, in 1977.
I assume her pictures to be of high technical quality. They certainly look fine to me. A few do possess a genuine element of surprise - Miller's great friend Picasso in puckish and in melancholy mode, Dylan Thomas when he was slim, young and easy, Sir Bernard Burrows of the diplomatic corps apparently blowing up inflatable waterwings on the Red Sea in 1938. More often, there is a kind of heaviness to the style. It is ironic to read that Miller especially admired the "flash of poetry" in the art of film, because the divine spark is precisely what I miss in her own technique, which is decidedly nearer prose than poesy.
Only the heaviest sort of humour enlivens it. Charlie Chaplin apparently balances a chandelier upon his head (from Miller's "witty" surrealist period). Saul Steinberg is made to look as though he is drawing the Long Man of Wilmington. Roland Penrose is comically in bed with mumps. Alfred H Barr, the immaculate first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, feeds swill to pigs on the Penrose farm, in a dire series of pho- tographs entitled Working Guests - another shows the unfortunate A J Ayer obliged to carry a basket of logs. In all the 157 pictures, only about a dozen people are smiling, let alone laughing, and six of them are members of a women's searchlight battery in London in 1943.
Perhaps my problem is that the whole oeuvre is somehow irretrievably dated. No era seems more outmoded, of course, than the one over one's shoulder; and, at the moment, the period of Miller's work, from the 1930s to the 1970s, is depressingly overfamiliar. Here are all the old Franco-Vogueish icons, the unavoidable Cocteau, Colette, Coco Chanel, Man Ray and Picasso, of course, together with less universal luminaries such as Ed Murrow, Osbert Lancaster and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Clark Gable is here, Alec Guinness, Gertrude Lawrence, Bob Hope, Lord Clark of Civilisation - allegorical characters, every one, of our already threadbare yesterdays. Few of them look much fun, except Joan Miro, seen delightedly feeding a hornbeam, Fred Astaire just being himself and Man Ray picnicking with a later lover, an entirely nude beauty from Martinique.
There is, for my tastes, one truly unforgettable image in the book. It shows Major Speedie of the 329th US Infantry waiting to launch an assault on the citadel at St Malo in 1944, and just for once the photograph seems to display a deeper sense of empathy. Perhaps it is the transcendental quality of this particular picture that I miss elsewhere in the collection. Miller's style has no mystery to it. Everything looks calculated or contrived. Even her photographs of liberated concentration camp prisoners, or war refugees, or shaven-headed female collaborators in Paris, or a suicide victim, or a beaten-up camp guard, or a horribly bandaged wounded soldier, seem to lack the magic of compassion.
Yes, now I know what my trouble is with these photographs. Pace Calvocoressi, who says just the opposite, it feels to me as though Miller was very seldom engaged. She did a series of wartime pictures of British service women, ranging from the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, deputy director of the Wrens, to a posterish land-girl on a tractor and that cheerful London searchlight crew. In none of them does Miller feel naturally, spontaneously at one with her subjects - the Marchioness is too remote, the land-girl too obviously symbolic, and with the laughing searchlight crew one feels that she has not quite understood the joke. She seems to share no wonder, no excitement, no pride of victory or misery of defeat, and she seldom seems sorry for anyone.
It is all efficient, humourless, slightly sad, detached professionalism: the sort of view of the world that a lovely American fashion model of the 1920s might have evolved, if she had been molested as a child, married an Egyptian industrialist and an English art collector, mingled with the European avant-garde, gone through a war and spent 20 years taking pictures for Vogue.
Lee Miller: portraits from a life by Richard Calvocoressi is published by Thames & Hudson (£27.50). The accompanying exhibition is at the Photographers' Gallery, London WC2 (020 7831 1772) until 25 January
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