If Lee Miller was to have taken a photograph of you, this is how she would have done it. “The Rolleiflex was her camera,” says Antony Penrose, Miller’s son, “which you operate from down here.” He holds a phantom Rolleiflex to his chest as we sit opposite each other with cups of tea at the kitchen table at Farleys. It is the Sussex home where Penrose grew up and which now serves as the museum and archive of Miller’s life and work taken over the course of her career as a surrealist artist, fashion photographer for Vogue and, later, during World War II, the magazine’s fearless war correspondent.
“She was a little bit bossy, a lot funny, and very engaging. She’d set everything up and she’d be chatting away to you,” Penrose continues, “and at the moment when you had the expression that she wanted, when you were the most relaxed…” Click. “And then she would wind on to the next one without looking at the camera. She knew what she was doing,” he reflects. “That’s why her portraits look so relaxed, because she just had that way of getting people to engage with her. They always had a smile. The smile was from talking to her.”
Penrose is smiling now. Though his relationship with his mother was complex - Miller was an alcoholic and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after the war - he loves to talk about her at work.
Penrose remembers Miller handing him one of her old cameras, a “beautiful
