I’m sad not to be able to visit the exhibition of Women Refugee Photographers, which would be at the Four Corners Gallery, close to us on the Roman Road, if it was able to open (I did try to go just before lockdown). Now that the exhibition is available online, I’m fascinated that one of the photographers is Heidi Heimann who used to turn up for lunches in the Warburg Institute in the 1970s and who I now realise had not only worked there, but had been a student of Panofsky in the early 1930s, trained as a photographer in Berlin, and was a photojournalist for Picture Post before joining the staff of the Warburg in 1954. How little one knows of one’s elders. I only remember her as rather shy and silent.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
It is extraordinary that online research makes it so easy for us to find out so much now about people we come across.
I was very lucky and met or worked with many of the key and fascinating figures of the 60s and 70s.
Back then, apart perhaps from a rather unrewarding and lengthy visit to a library , there was no way of discovering their background or full achievements or their thinking .
Now i have time and the ability to research their lives in the greatest detail and discover things they achieved ,connections with other people and places and even relatives of mine that would have immediately established a greater rapport.
i wish i could now go back and meet many of them again and appreciate them in more detail.
Yes, I very much agree with this. Even in a library, which was where I met her, it would have been hard to find out the sort of information which is now so freely and easily available online through name searches, enriching our knowledge of less well known people of the recent past. Charles