Weekend: Antiques and Collecting: An Intense Intellectual Exchange; Richard Edmonds Savours Photographic Images at Two Exhibitions in Los Angeles

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Byline: Richard Edmonds

Photography is very much in the air at the moment - at least in America.

Last week, I visited two superb exhibitions in Los Angeles - one was at the Getty and the other at Los Angeles County Museum. The Getty show was devoted to the work of Man Ray - the master of the surrealist photograph - and Lee Miller, a remarkable woman who began life as a model then became Man Ray's mistress and acolyte.

During the 1940s Lee Miller took some devastating war photographs and was there with her camera when the Nazi death camps at Dachau and Buchenwald were revealed in all their horror and vileness.

The Getty gallery walls (and is there a more beautiful museum in the world than this gleaming white marble structure which overlooks the Pacific?) showed that between 1925 and 1945 Miller's intense physical, social and intellectual exchange with Man Ray and Roland Penrose (another of the surrealist brethren) enabled her to see the world around her in new and different ways.

Miller's photograph of Charlie Chaplin contrast with surreal images when distant horizons are framed by an opening in a torn …