Lee, the movie

Why didn’t my favorite movie of last year get nominated for an Academy Award?

February 11, 2025

The film Lee, starring Kate Winslet, who also produced what she describes as her “passion project,” was not nominated for any academy awards, a huge oversight in my considered opinion. Based on the book The Lives of Lee Miller by her son Anthony Penrose, her story had largely disappeared from photographic history as she produced little work after World War 2. More than Edward Steichen’s model, Man Ray’s muse and lover, and Picasso’s friend, she was a tremendous artist in her own right. Her story is worth knowing.

The broad outlines: born and raised in the suburbs of New York, she became one of the most acclaimed fashion models of the 1920’s in New York City. Moving to Paris, she apprenticed with Man Ray (developing the Solarization darkroom technique) with whom she had a tempestuous affair. As war descended on Europe in the 1930’s, she became a photojournalist, with David Scherman one of the first to photograph the liberated Dachau concentration camp. In the aftermath of the war, her trauma caused her to descend into alcoholism, leading to a fairly neglectful motherhood.

Her son, Antony Penrose, knew nothing of his mother’s life until after her death, when in cleaning out her house he found boxes of negatives she had shot and stories she had written during the war.

Penrose also published a book of his mother’s photography, much of it from the war, some difficult to see. Another take on a small slice of Miller’s life, her affair with Man Ray, is imagined in the historical novel Age of Light by Whitney Scharer.

Winslet has brought new life to Lee Miller’s story, here she discusses the film with Christine Amanpour on PBS, including some of the background on Miller.

One of Miller’s most iconic images of of her, not by her, sitting in Hitler’s Munich bathtub after coming to the city from Dachau, was featured in a New Yorker article coinciding with the film.

While Winslet received a Golden Globe and AACTA International Awards nomination for best actress, and the film received a nomination from BAFTA for Best British Film, she was snubbed by the Oscars.

To answer the initial question… I don’t know. Perhaps too dark a subject for these times, perhaps misogyny on the part of Academy voters, perhaps too niche of a film, or too small a box office. A shame, as this is a film that needs to be seen, perhaps now more than ever.

And so it begins…

Appalachian Trail, Pennsylvania, 2017

An attempt at discipline, at following a practice, at working out my writing in public. Progress has been slow on the tome I’m endeavoring to write: “Buddha and Bowen: A Systems Perspective on Resilient Leadership.” That’s a different website, fortunately for my photographer friends. But the impetus for writing has led me to try my hand at a daily (weekly? weakly?) writing exercise about photography and the creative life. Some of this will be based on my own work, some will be based on the work of others. I hope that you find something of value here, even if not everything is to your liking.

The image above was captured in 2017 while scouting an Intersession trip for The Nora School. It languished in my Lightroom catalog until last December, when I went searching for a boring image with which to challenge my Creative Accountability Group. As part of our monthly Zoom meeting, we take a common image to edit, each in our own way. The results are pretty remarkable in the range of images we produce. Below is the original image, unretouched.

Alas, the Appalachian Trail backpacking trip across the state of Maryland did not occur, as my father passed away a few days before we were to leave. All that remains is a bittersweet memory of a snowy March day at the Maryland/Pennsylvania border, and the raw material for a group of creative artists to see beyond a banal scene to find some element of beauty.

Appalachian Trail, Pennsylvania, 2017, raw file