Lee Miller Exhibition

One of the things we managed to get to in London last week was the Lee Miller exhibition at Tate Britain.

I am not sure what to think about it. Almost everyone knows about her photographs in the concentration camps, but I suspect fewer know about her development as a photographer.

I didn’t particularly like her work with Man Ray. I didn’t think the technical aspects of photography was important to them, but I found the lack of focus and the constrained tonal range irritating.

I thought that I would be able to wander around at leisure, but it was packed and trying to see everything just wasn’t possible.

Blame Kate Winslet

Quite probably, it was a good film though.

Well, I can’t get to New York for this, but I found Don McCullin’s war photographs far more impactful than Miller’s.

In many respects, I think they are technically better too.

I saw the harrowing McCullin exhibition in London and have the book. To be fair, he was born a quarter of a century after Miller and was a documentary and war photographer pretty much all his life rather than being involved in early 20th century modernist art photography and painting. He’s also a bloke in what was, and even now is, an extremely bloke world.

It was a mixed bag. I loved the composition or some of the smaller urban shots. Fantastic interplay of light and texture.
Exhibitions in London are such a scrum these days. Everything has to be an ‘event’.

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