The Photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor: Artist and Lover

The past decade has seen a well-deserved revival of interest in the books of travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Now it’s time that his wife, Joan Leigh Fermor (1912–2003), gets her due—as one of the greatest photographers of her generation. In her lifetime, Leigh Fermor was hailed—and hired—by John Betjemen and Cyril Connelly, and she was recognized as a powerful recorder of the London Blitz. But the true scale of her achievement was only realized after her death, when a treasure trove of photographs was discovered documenting the landscape and culture of Greece between 1945 and 1960. Through Leigh Fermor’s fundamentally democratic lens, we meet Cretan shepherds, Meteoran monastics, and Macedonian bear tamers. She brings the same intimate eye to architecture, while showing just as much facility in the panoramas of landscape—all clearly animated by a love of Greece. This book, drawn from a collection of five thousand images held by the National Library of Scotland, offers our first chance to see Leigh Fermor for what she was: a twentieth-century master.