The Memory of Photography

In view of the expectations raised by the microsite for The Art of Lee Miller exhibition, currently at the V&A Museum (see previous post), I was not disappointed when I finally went to see it today.

The show itself foregrounds photographic materiality and historicity by privileging vintage prints (produced close to the time of the negative, as the introductory panel explained), even when these are in a fragile or even damaged condition. This means that most of the works on show are quite small, and invite a the viewer to take up a pleasingly intimate distance to each object. The sense of intimacy is further induced by the dark interior of the exhibition space – the walls are painted black – which is of course also an illusion to the interior of the black box that is the camera.

In the section devoted to Miller’s wartime photographs, the visitors are provided with two facsimile copies of an issue of Vogue (June 1945) which featured her photographs taken with the Allies in Germany in April and May that year. The curators are doing the audience a crucial service by allowing us to flick through this magazine rather than simply admire the spreads in glass cases (although they are also on show in this manner). For by leafing through the pages upon pages of advertising for the most absurdly luxurious items, which precede Miller’s pictures from the liberation of Buchenwald, we may in some sense come to these horribly familiar images of atrocity anew, and recognise something of the shock they must have produced in their viewers the first time they were published – in that most unlikely of publications.

Displaying the wartime spreads from Vogue in three different formats – as blown-up photocopies on the wall, in the facsimile magazines and in the original copies of the magazines on show beneath glass – the exhibition is at pains to underscore the material context in which these particular photographs first appeared. Yet the real treat for visitors who relish in the materiality of photographic production lies (quite literally) in store once one has left the exhibition proper. For in the shop into which one is forced to enter when exiting the show itself, the V&A’s merchandising team have created what is in many ways a second exhibition: a display of objects for sale whose sole criterion for inclusion seems to be that they function in some way or form as material allusions, either to photography, to Lee Miller, or to both. Thus we have, for example (click to enlarge):

On the left, an apron (!) decorated with prints of a Rolleiflex camera and a light meter, reproduced more or less to size. On the right, a pile of kaleidoscope lenses fitted into holders made from a photographic reproduction of a Rolleiflex camera (they are available in several other, pre-digital camera types as well, the newest of these outdated objects being the Nikon F90, which came out in 1992). To left in the right-hand image one can also spot a stack of loupes, of the kind with which we used to look at 35mm negatives. In addition, the same table offered pinhole camera kits, notebooks with an image of a Rolleiflex on the front, lapel badges with the same motif, and an empty wooden box with elaborate ‘retro’ typography, which supposedly was meant to contain ‘photographs’.

Add to these items of merchandise the mugs, the t-shirts, the calendars and, er, the pots of ‘Lee Miller apple jam’ offered for sale (Miller’s last decades having been characterised by a love of cooking – presumably also the tenuous justification for the apron), and The Art of Lee Miller exemplifies that knick-knackification of art exhibitions which is more and more an integral part of the museum ‘deal’ these days. It is as if, having first experienced a body of work as ‘Art’, we are immediately expected to re-consume it in the form of kitsch.

Interestingly, however, the Lee Miller estate is too keen to preserve (or should that be push?) the status of her œuvre as ‘Art’ – cf. the exhibition’s title – to have allowed too much exploitation of her images in the merchandise accompanying this particular show. As far as I could tell from my visit, there is only a calendar and a few postcards that actually feature reproductions of Miller’s photographs, although the mug is decorated with one of her drawings. Instead, it is photography that provides the knick-knack merchants with their main visual and material referent.