Lee Miller, war photographer and model
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the early summer of 1945, Lee Miller sent a telegram back to London about what she had seen in the Nazi death camps. “I implore you to believe this is true,” she wrote. Her employers were Vogue magazine. How did a famous beauty like Miller end up covering the war?
Her extraordinary life and the images she left, most famously posing in Hitler's bath, are explored here by Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News. She is joined by Miller's son, Antony Penrose. Lee Miller was American, born in 1907, but lived in Paris and Cairo and then London during the blitz. Her lovers included Man Ray, she knew Cocteau and Picasso, and was an important surrealist. But it was her work in world war two that leads Lindsey Hilsum to claim her as Marie Colvin's spiritual ancestor. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.
Photo copyright www.leemiller.co.uk
Transcript
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| 0:45.0 | In the early summer of 1945, a journalist called Lee Miller, |
| 0:50.0 | sent a telegram to her employers in London from Germany about the horrors she'd seen in the concentration camps. |
| 0:57.0 | I implore you to believe this is true, she wrote, and in another no question that German civilians knew what went on. |
| 1:05.4 | Her employers, somewhat unexpectedly, were not a national newspaper, but the fashion magazine |
| 1:11.2 | Vogue, a magazine whose cover Miller had once graced. |
| 1:16.2 | Though she was perhaps more famously photographed in Hitler's Bath, with me to nominate this complex |
| 1:22.4 | and at times almost unbelievable life, the life of Lee Miller, is Lindsay |
| 1:26.7 | Hilton, journalist, writer and international editor of Channel 4 News. |
| 1:31.8 | Have you ever sat in a dictator's bath? |
| 1:35.0 | Oh well, no, but I have a photograph of myself and I should say at this point fully |
| 1:41.3 | closed and I am sitting on one of |
| 1:44.0 | Saddam Hussein's golden toilets. Oh you brought it great. Oh good news |
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