Postscript

In 2003 Bailey won one of the inaugural Jerwood Photography Awards for 2 Willow Road, a photographic essay on the library of modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger and his wife Ursula Blackwell. Bailey offered an interpretation of the lives and relationship of the couple utilising nothing more than a book’s title and its physical presence. With Postscript, she similarly addresses the written correspondence from 1937 of model/muse/photgrapher/war correspondent Lee Miller (1907-1977) mostly with artist/writer and ultimately husband Roland Penrose (1900-1984) but also with one of her wartime employers, Audrey Withers, editor of Vogue.

Miller is unsurprisingly the primary focus, an intense and thoroughly complex woman, who lived a frenetic life in frenetic times amongst equally remarkable people. Her son, Antony Penrose, observed that “whatever she became involved in, her commitment was total and the consequence to herself and others was only of minor consideration.”Bailey was granted full access by the Lee Miller Archive at Farley Farm in East Sussex and the resulting work largely concerns itself with letters written during World War II, by the end of which Milller was a photographer accredited to the US Army as well as a highly prized correspondent for Vogue. During the year after D-Day she witnessed the siege of St. Malo, the Liberation of Paris, the fighting in Luxembourg and Alsace, the Russian/American link up at Torgau and the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. After the cessation of hostilities, Miller ignored Penrose’s pleas to return and continued to roam across a shattered Europe, in particular Austria, Hungary and Romania, all then largely under Soviet control.

Although Postscript echoes themes addressed in 2 Willow Road, for Bailey, and hence ultimately the viewer, the involvement is more personal than that series. Much of this correspondence has the residual echoes of this passionately charged, volatile relationship and while we are never privy to the content, Bailey’s titles, drawn from the texts, and the form of the work itself, leave one in little doubt as to its power despite Miller’s apparent unwillingness in this period to stand still and immerse herself in it – they only married in 1947. The images illuminate this through the visual evidence of the letters/telegrams themselves, the privacy of the lovers often protected by the original envelopes, yet their intimacy somehow emphasised. Shirking a conventional narrative, Bailey has again formulated a visually arresting and meditative body of work from simple and spare resources usually regarded as the rather arid fiefdom of the professional biographer.