Amazing photographs and the people who took them

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History stories.

We focus on some of the world’s best known photographs - and the photographers who took them.

We find out why Lee Miller was in Hitler’s bath in the dying days of World War Two; and historian Dr Pippa Oldfield discusses the women who were the pioneers of war photography.

Also, Sir Don McCullin tells the story behind one of his most famous images of the Vietnam War.

Plus, more on the party pictures that shone a light on an unseen Africa and how the biggest names in jazz came together for one immortal portrait.

Finally, the first African American woman to have her photographs snapped up by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Contributors: Antony Penrose, Lee Miller's son and biographer Sir Don McCullin, photographer Dr Pippa Oldfield, photo-historian Manthia Diawara, filmmaker Jonathan Kane, son of photographer Art Kane Ming Smith, photographer

(Photo: Grace Jones. Studio 54, New York, 1970s. Credit: Ming Smith)

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Happy Pod is a special weekly episode from the Global News Podcast, bringing new positive stories and uplifting interviews from around the world.
0:08.0	Thousands of lives are being saved by bandages that can stop heavy bleeding in less than a minute.
0:13.2	It's there to save lives.
0:14.4	It's great to go to bed night knowing that we can help.
0:16.4	Listen now by searching for the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service,
0:20.5	wherever you get your podcast. Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:32.0	the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:34.9	This week, perhaps counterintuitively for the medium of sound, we're looking at the history of
0:39.2	photography through some of the world's best-known images and the photographers who took them.
0:43.6	Coming up, a shell-shocked US marine in Vietnam.
0:46.8	I dropped on my knees and I photographed five frames of him,
0:50.8	each of those individual frames, you cannot tell the difference.
0:55.0	There's not one blink of an eyelid with this man.
0:58.0	Also, the black and white party pictures that shone a light on an unseen Africa,
1:02.0	how the biggest names in jazz came together for one
1:04.9	immortal portrait, and the first African American woman to have her photographs snapped up by the
1:10.4	Museum of Modern Art. They gave me validation all through those lean years, you know, not having money or the criticism.
1:19.5	I mean, it was like a pet on the back.
1:21.9	That's all coming up in this podcast, but we're going to begin with an image which has become one of the most famous of the Second World War. It's Lee Miller in Hitler's Bath. Here's Josephine McDamard.
1:33.0	It's 1945 and over the last six years
1:37.0	Germany's Nazi leader has brought the world to the brink of destruction.
1:41.0	More than 50 million people have been killed. Lee Miller is a war
	...

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