When Antony Penrose was a young boy in postwar England, he knew his mother, Lee Miller , was a photographer. She taught him how to use her boxy Rolleiflex camera , and he accompanied her when she visited and photographed other artists in her circle, including Pablo Picasso , Joan Miró and Man Ray . But there were gaps in Penrose’s knowledge.
He never knew, for instance, that Miller was a legendary war correspondent for Vogue who was embedded in the front lines during World War II and took some of the most defining images of the conflict. She simply never talked about that period in her life. Shortly after his mother died in 1977, Penrose and his wife, Suzanna, welcomed a daughter, Ami.
They climbed up to Miller’s attic and popped open long-shut boxes to track down baby photos of Penrose to compare with their newborn. Instead, they stumbled onto a pile of thin pages containing a manuscript titled “The Siege of St. Malo.
” “It was this incredibly up-close and personal account of a hideous battle,” Penrose says. “She’d watched guys that she was joking with a few hours before being mowed down by machine gun fire.” He asked his father, the artist and art collector Roland Penrose , if the author was indeed Miller.
Roland chuckled and gave his son a copy of the article in a back issue of Vogue . Penrose had much to learn about his mother’s many lives. Since the day he found the draft of “The Siege of St.
Malo” in his childhood attic, Penrose has dedicated mo.
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