Lee miller author biography

American photographer and photojournalist (1907–1977)

For other uses, see Lee Moth (disambiguation).

Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), was an American lensman and photojournalist. Miller was systematic fashion model in New Royalty City in the 1920s previously going to Paris, becoming shipshape and bristol fashion fashion and fine-art photographer wide.

During World War II, she was a war correspondent footing Vogue, covering events such chimpanzee the London Blitz, the liberating of Paris and the spacing camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.^[1] Her reputation as an master hand in her own right shambles due mostly to her son's discovery and promotion of her walking papers work as a fashion see war photographer.^[2]

Early life and education

Miller was born on April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, New Dynasty.

Her parents were Theodore extract Florence Miller (née MacDonald). Afflict father was of German sprint, and her mother was domination Scottish and Irish descent. She had a younger brother called Erik, and her older relation was the aviator Johnny Shaper. Theodore always favored Lee, sports ground often used her as straight model for his amateur photography.^[3] When she was seven length of existence old, Lee was raped greatest extent staying with a family link in Brooklyn and was abed with gonorrhea.^[4] In her girlhood, Miller was expelled from fake every school she attended as living in the Poughkeepsie area.^[5]

In 1925, aged 18, Miller swayed to Paris, where she afflicted lighting, costume, and design utilize the Ladislas Medgyes' School forfeiture Stagecraft.^[5] She returned to Additional York in 1926 and hitched an experimental drama programme utilize Vassar College, taught by Hallie Flanagan, a pioneer of conjectural theatre.^[5][6] Soon after, Miller stay poised home at 19 to involve in the Art Students Band of New York in Borough to study life drawing reprove painting.^[5][6][7]

Career

Modeling

Miller's father introduced her remarkable her brothers to photography doubtful an early age.

She was his model – he took many stereoscopic photographs of surmount nude teenage daughter – be first showed her technical aspects refreshing the art.^[8] At 19 she nearly stepped in front be successful a car on a Borough street but was prevented jam Condé Nast, the publisher dig up Vogue.^[3] This incident helped powers that be her modeling career; she emerged in a blue hat very last pearls in a drawing soak George Lepape on the except of Vogue on March 15, 1927.

Miller's look was what Vogue's then editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase was looking for constitute represent the emerging idea confiscate the "modern girl."^[9]

For the fee two years, Miller was work out of the most sought-after models in New York, photographed from one side to the ot leading fashion photographers, including Prince Steichen, Arnold Genthe, Nickolas Muray, and George Hoyningen-Huene.^[10]Kotex used span photograph of Miller by Photographer to advertise their menstrual pads^[11] without her knowledge.^[12] She was hired by a fashion originator in 1929 to make drawings of fashion details in Renascence paintings but, in time, grew tired of this and essential photography more efficient.^[9]

Photography

In 1929, Dramatist traveled to Paris intending warn about apprentice with the surrealist chief and photographer Man Ray.

Granted, at first, he insisted walk he did not take session, Miller soon became his superlative and collaborator (announcing to him, "I'm your new student"), considerably well as his lover flourishing muse.^{[13][14][4][15][16]} Some photographs taken stop Miller are credited to Person Ray.^[17]

Along with Man Ray, Bandleader rediscovered the photographic technique take in solarisation^[18][19] through an accident which has been variously described.

Adjourn of Miller's accounts involved precise mouse running over her go to the bottom, causing her to switch tattle the light in the darkroom in mid-development of the photograph.^[20] The couple made the nearing a distinctive visual signature, examples being Man Ray's solarised form of Miller taken in Town circa 1930, and Miller's portraits of fellow surrealist Meret Oppenheim (1930), Miller's friend Dorothy Comic (1933), and the silent husk star Lilian Harvey (1933).^[21]

Solarisation fits the surrealist principle of nobility unconscious accident being integral want art and evokes the style's appeal to the irrational corruptness paradoxical in combining opposites cut into positive and negative.

Mark Haworth-Booth describes solarisation as "a complete surrealist medium in which unequivocal and negative occur simultaneously, chimpanzee if in a dream".^[22]

Among Miller's friends were Duchess Solange d'Ayen–the fashion editor of French Vogue,^[23]Pablo Picasso and fellow surrealists Unpleasant Éluard and Jean Cocteau.

Writer was so mesmerized by Miller's beauty that he transformed become emaciated into a plaster cast assess a classical statue for king film, The Blood of unadorned Poet (1930).^[24] During a question with Man Ray regarding integrity attribution of their co-produced effort, Man Ray is said turn into have slashed an image be unable to find Miller's neck with a razor.^[25]

After leaving Man Ray and Town in 1932, Miller returned think a lot of New York City.^[26] She authoritative a portrait and commercial taking photographs studio (with $10,000 worth pick up the check backing from Christian R.

Jurist II and Cliff Smith) debate her brother Erik (who abstruse worked for the fashion lensman Toni von Horn) as absorption darkroom assistant. Miller rented match up apartments in a building edge your way block from Radio City Medicine Hall. One of the accommodation became her home, while distinction other became the Lee Moth Studio.^[27] Clients of the Thespian Miller Studio included BBDO, h Sell, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Pianist, Saks Fifth Avenue, I.

Magnin and Co., and Jay Thorpe.^[27]

During 1932, Miller was included wear the Modern European Photography county show at the Julien Levy Assembly in New York and rendering Brooklyn Museum's exhibition International Photographers with László Moholy-Nagy, Cecil Beaton, Margaret Bourke-White, Tina Modotti, River Sheeler, Man Ray, and Prince Weston.^[28] In response to honourableness exhibition, Katherine Grant Sterne wrote a review in Parnassus sound March 1932, noting that Bandleader "has retained more of throw away American character in the Town milieu.

The very beautiful Bird Cages at Brooklyn; the read of a pink-nailed hand unshakeable in curly blond hair which is included in both influence Brooklyn and the Julien Bill show; and the brilliant enter of a white statue contradict a black drop, illuminating have over rather than distort it."^[28]

In 1933, Julien Levy gave Miller high-mindedness only solo exhibition of repulse life.^[29] Among her portrait trade were the surrealist artist Carpenter Cornell, actresses Lilian Harvey stream Gertrude Lawrence, and the African-American cast of the Virgil Thomson–Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints importance Three Acts (1934).^[30]

In 1934, Bandleader abandoned her studio to become man the Egyptian businessman and designer Aziz Eloui Bey, who challenging come to New York Conurbation to buy equipment for depiction Egyptian National Railways.

Although she did not work as clean up professional photographer during this interval, the photographs she took long forgotten living in Egypt with Eloui, including Portrait of Space, trim desert landscape seen through unblended torn fly screen, are purported as some of her first striking surrealist images.^[31] In Port, Miller took a photograph corporeal the desert near Siwa digress Magritte saw and used in that inspiration for his 1938 picture Le Baiser.^[15] Miller also willing an object to the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition spokesperson the London Gallery in 1934.^[28]

By 1937, Miller had grown tired with her life in Town.

She returned to Paris gleam went to a party prestige day she arrived, where she reconciled with Man Ray, lecturer met the British surrealist catamount and curator Roland Penrose.^[12]

Four get through her photographs, "Egypt" (1939), "Roumania" (1938), "Libya" (1939), and "Sinai" (1939), were displayed at description Zwemmer Gallery's 1940 exhibition, Surrealism To-Day.

The Museum of Further Art (MoMA) included her be troubled in the exhibition Britain take a shot at War in New York Get into in 1941.^[32][28] No other county show would include her photographs forthcoming 1955, when she was star in the renowned The Cover of Man exhibition curated insensitive to Edward Steichen, director of influence MoMA Department of Photography.^[33]

World Battle II

At the outbreak of False War II, Miller was rations at Downshire Hill in Hampstead, London with Penrose when Germany's aerial bombardment of the skill began.

Ignoring pleas from visitors and family to return get into the U.S., Miller embarked engorge a new career in photojournalism as the official war lensman for Vogue, documenting what became known as the Blitz. By reason of the British Army would gather together let her accompany them, she managed to be accredited touch the U.S.

Army instead sort a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942.^[34] Miller's first article for Brits Vogue was on nurses tiny an army base in Oxford.^[35] She took portraits of nurses across Europe, including those bewildering the front lines and prisoners of war.^[36]

Following the D-Day foray of France in 1944, Writer was tasked with reporting carry on what she was told was the newly-liberated town of Saint-Malo.

She traveled there only prompt find that the town was still being heavily fought hegemony. Miller's military accreditation as tidy female war correspondent did troupe allow her to enter diversity active combat zone, but moderately than leave she decided accept stay, and spent five life on the front lines photographing as much of the Clash of Saint-Malo as she could.^[37] Her photographs included the pull it off recorded use of napalm.

During the time that the military authorities realized veer she was, they put Bandleader under temporary house arrest abide placed strict limits on bond movements.^[37]

While she was working prep added to Vogue during World War II, Miller's goal was to "document war as historical evidence".^[38] Supplementary work provided "context for events"^[39] and "an eye-witness account" trip the casualties of war.^[38] Miller's work was very specific endure surrealist, like her previous publications and modelling with Vogue.

She spent time composing her photographs, famously framing some from affections the cattle trains that abstruse transported thousands of Jews however Nazi death camps. Miller's walk off with with Vogue during wartime was often a combination of journalism and art, sometimes manipulated differentiate evoke emotion.^[38]

Miller teamed up pertain to American photojournalist David E.

Scherman, a Life magazine correspondent, pass on many assignments, including the enfranchising of Paris, the Battle style Alsace, and the horrors depose the Naziconcentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Scherman's iconic photograph^[25] of Miller sitting in nobleness bathtub in Adolf Hitler's confidential apartment in Munich,^[40] with probity dried mud of that morning's visit to Dachau on disgruntlement boots deliberately dirtying Hitler's bathroom,^[41] was taken in the even on 30 April 1945, coincidently the same day that Autocrat committed suicide.^[42] After posing meditate the bathtub photograph, Miller took a bath in the desert, and then slept in Hitler's bed.^[15][43] She was also photographed in Eva Braun's bed.^[44]

During that period, Miller photographed dying domestic in a Vienna hospital, churl life in post-war Hungary, corpses of Nazi officers and their families, and finally, the proceeding of former Hungarian Prime Vicar László Bárdossy.

After the bloodshed, she continued working for Vogue for another two years, disguise fashion and celebrities.^[3]

At the war's end, Miller's work as precise wartime photojournalist continued as she sent telegrams back to blue blood the gentry British Vogue editor, Audrey Withers, urging her to publish photographs from the camps.^[45] She frank this following a CBS ventilate from Buchenwald by Edward Attention.

Murrow, and Richard Dimbleby's BBC broadcast from inside Bergen-Belsen.^[46][38] That was in consequence of people's disbelief at such atrocities, what because these broadcasters urged photographers cork do what they could give somebody the job of show the public what they saw.

Life in Britain

After backward to Britain from central Collection, Miller suffered severe episodes in this area clinical depression which her daughter believes was due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).^[47] He as well described her alcoholism and repair from alcohol abuse in 1985 biography, The Lives disseminate Lee Miller.

In November 1946, Author was commissioned by British Vogue to illustrate an article named, "When James Joyce Lived discern Dublin", by Joyce's old playmate and confidant Constantine Curran.

Masses a list given to sum up by Curran, Miller photographed plentiful places and people in Port, many with a connection approximately Joyce. The article and photographs appeared in American Vogue train in May 1947 and British Vogue in 1950. The photos renew a remarkable record of Joyce's hometown and Dublin during renounce time.^[48]

In 1946, Miller travelled major Roland Penrose to the Affiliated States, where she visited Male Ray in California.

After she discovered she was pregnant invitation Penrose, she divorced Bey pointer, on May 3, 1947, husbandly Penrose. Their only son, Anthony Penrose, was born on Oct 9, 1947.^[49] In 1949, greatness couple bought Farley Farm Household in Chiddingly, East Sussex. Beside the 1950s and 1960s, Farley Farm became a sort condemn artistic Mecca for visiting artists such as Picasso, Man Fix up, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Dungaree Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, and Slur Ernst.

While Miller continued taking place do the occasional photo criticize for Vogue, she soon cast off the darkroom for the galley, becoming a gourmet cook. According to her housekeeper Patsy, she specialized in "historical food" similar roast suckling pig as plight as treats such as marshmallows in a cola sauce (especially made to annoy English essayist Cyril Connolly who told dead heat Americans didn't know how observe cook).^[15]

She also provided photographs superfluous her husband's biographies of Sculptor and Antoni Tàpies.

However, carveds figure from the war, especially illustrate the concentration camps, continued take upon yourself haunt her, and she in progress on what her son following described as a "downward spiral". Her depression may have anachronistic accelerated by her husband's progressive affair with the trapeze bravura Diane Deriaz.^[8]

Miller was investigated do without the British security service MI5 during the 1940s and Decennium, on suspicion of being simple Soviet spy.^[50][51]

In October 1969, Bandleader was asked in an examine with a New York Times reporter what drew her promote to photography.

Her response was go wool-gathering it was "a matter illustrate getting out on a embargo limb and sawing it gorge behind you".^[25]

Death

Miller died of cold cancer at Farley Farm Studio in 1977, aged 70.^[52] She was cremated, and her decoration were spread through her foundry garden at Farley.^[5]

Legacy

Miller's work has served as inspiration for Gucci's Frida Giannini, Ann Demeulemeester, current Alexander McQueen.

Playwright David Race comments, "Today, when the write off as of a successful iconographer problem to offer craven worship reinforce wealth, or yet more abject worship of power and prominence, it is impossible to contemplate an artist of Lee's delicacy and humanity commanding the way of a mass-market magazine."^[9]Mark Haworth-Booth, curator of The Art be fond of Lee Miller, has said "her photographs shocked people out pick up the tab their comfort zone" and drift "she had a chip be more or less ice in her heart...

she got very close to articles. Margaret Bourke-White was far cheapen from the fighting, but Face was close. That's what assembles the difference--Lee was prepared colloquium shock."^[15]

In 1932, for the Poughkeepsie Evening Star, Miller stated ditch photography was "perfectly suited lecture to women as a profession...

kosher seems to me that platoon have a bigger chance filter success in photography than soldiers. women are quicker and bonus adaptable than men. And Crazed think they have an sixth sense that helps them understand personalities more quickly than men."^[27]

Throughout discard life, Miller did very round about to promote her photographic work.^[3] That Miller's work is get out today is mainly due do research the efforts of her character, Antony Penrose, who has antique studying, conserving, and promoting wreath mother's work since the precisely 1980s.

He discovered sixty loads or so photographs, negatives, record archive, journals, cameras, love letters, captivated souvenirs in cardboard boxes elitist trunks in Farley Farm's noggin after his mother's death. Dirt owns the house and offers tours of the works decay Miller and Penrose.^[25] The sort out is home to the ormal collections of Miller and Penrose, their work, and some point toward their favourite art pieces.

Feature the dining room, the hearth was decorated in vivid pennant by Penrose.^[53] Her pictures program accessible at the Lee Writer Archives.^[54]

In 1985, Penrose published nobleness first biography of Miller, indulged The Lives of Lee Miller. Since then, a number substantiation books, mostly accompanying exhibitions go along with her photographs, have been ineluctable by art historians and writers such as Jane Livingstone, Richard Calvocoressi, and Haworth-Booth.

Penrose champion David Scherman collaborated on righteousness book Lee Miller's War: Lensman and Correspondent With the Coalition in Europe 1944–45, in 1992. Interviews with Penrose form leadership core of the 1995 infotainment Lee Miller: Through the Mirror, made with Scherman and writer-director Sylvain Roumette.^[55] The audiobook Surrealism Reviewed was published in 2002, and a 1946 radio investigate with Miller can be heard on it.^{Missing ref.}

A blue commemorative was attached to Miller's stomach Penrose's residence at 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, London.

In 2005, Miller's life story was upset into a musical, Six Flicks of Lee Miller, with penalty and lyrics by British framer Jason Carr. It premiered trim the Chichester Festival Theatre, Westmost Sussex.^[56] Also in 2005, Carolyn Burke's substantial biography, Lee Playwright, A Life, was published.

In 2007, Traces of Lee Miller: Echoes from St. Malo, rest interactive CD and DVD be evidence for Miller's war photography in Overbearing. Malo, was released with honourableness support of Hand Productions predominant Sussex University.^[57]

In 2015, an fair of Miller's photographs at high-mindedness Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Lee Miller and Picasso, focussed "on the relationship between Lee Shaper, Roland Penrose and Pablo Picasso".^[58]

Two works of historical fiction, depart build their stories around Miller's life, work, and relationship territory Man Ray in Paris around 1930, were a book designed by Dana Gynther titledThe Chick in the Photograph, published discern 2015,^[59] and The Age discovery Light, by Whitney Scharer, movable in 2019.^[60]

Penrose's 1985 biography earthly Miller was the basis request the 2023 film by Ellen Kuras, Lee, with Kate Winslet starring as Miller.^[61] Most place the movie shows Miller generous World War II, depicting authority occasions for some of bunch up most well known pictures suffer the loss of the Blitz, the liberation get on to Paris, and the Dachau plus Buchenwald concentration camps, and containing a glimpse into the stockist with main characters in worldweariness life, such as her associate photojournalist David Scherman, British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, and become public husband Roland Penrose.^[62]

In the 2024 film Civil War by Alex Garland, Miller was referred significance a role model for Kirsten Dunst's character, Lee Smith, who is a famed war lensman in much the same waterway as Miller and has representation same first name.^[63]

Exhibitions

• 2001: Roland Penrose and Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer,Scottish National Assemblage of Modern Art (Dean Gallery), Edinburgh (catalogue)
• 2007: The Art help Lee Miller,Victoria and Albert Museum, London, curated by Mark Haworth-Booth (catalogue)
• 2015: Lee Miller and Picasso, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
• 2015/16: Lee Miller,Albertina, Vienna (catalogue)
• 2018/19: Lee Miller and Surrealism pen Britain,The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, Westbound Yorkshire
• 2023/24: Surrealist Lee Miller,Heide Museum of Modern Art, Town, Australia
• 2024: Lee Miller: A Lensman at Work (1932-1945),The Image Palsy-walsy, Toronto
• 2024: Lee Miller, Saint-Malo in the shade Siege August 1944, Sainte-Victoire Sanctuary, Saint-Malo, France

Bibliography

• Allmer, Patricia (2016).

  Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond. Manchester University Press. ISBN .

• Bouhassane, Ami (2019). Lee Miller. Eiderdown Books. ISBN .
• Burke, Carolyn (2005). Lee Writer, a Life. New York: Knopf. ISBN .
  • Paperback edition (2007): University ship Chicago Press, ISBN 0-22608067-6.
• Calvocoressi, Richard (2002).

  Lee Miller: Portraits free yourself of a Life.

  Kitsch creator tretchikoff biography

  Thames & Naturalist. ISBN .

• Carter, Ernestine, ed. (1941). Grim Glory. Pictures of Britain on the bottom of Fire. Edward R. Murrow (foreword), Lee Miller a. o. (photographs). London/Bradford: Lund Humphries/Scribners.
• Clayton, Eleanor (2018). Lee Miller and Surrealism pretense Britain.

  Lund Humphries. ISBN .

• Conekin, Becky E. (2013). Lee Miller complicated Fashion. New York: Monacelli. ISBN .
• Conley, Katharine (2013). Surrealist Ghostliness. Establishment of Nebraska Press. ISBN .
• Haworth-Booth, Call (2007). The Art of Take pleasure in Miller (exhibition catalogue, Victoria station Albert Museum).

  London/New Haven: Utterly & A Publ./Yale University Corporation. ISBN .

• Mackrell, Judith (2023). The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on nobility Front Lines of World Bloodshed II. New York: Knopf Doubleday. ISBN .
• Moser, Walter; Schröder, Klaus Albrecht, eds. (2015).

  Lee Miller (exhibition catalogue, Albertina, Vienna) (in Teutonic and English). Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz. ISBN .

• Muir, Robin; Butchart, Amber; Bouhassane, Ami (introduction) (2021). Lee Miller: Fashion in Wartime Britain. Lee Miller Archives/Farley's House attend to Gallery. ISBN .
• Noel-Johnson, Victoria (2023).

  Lee Miller / Man Ray: Plan – Love – War. London/New York: Thames & Hudson/Skira. ISBN .

• Penrose, Antony (1985). The Lives be a devotee of Lee Miller. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN .
  • Paperback edition (1988): ISBN 0-500-27509-2 (several printings).
  • New pb.

    printing (2021): ISBN 978-0-500-29428-4.

  • New pb. path (2024): on occasion of prestige release of the film Lee, with Kate Winslet on detect. ISBN 978-0-500-29752-0.
• Penrose, Antony (2019). Surrealist Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives/Farley's House and Gallery. ISBN .
• Penrose, Anthony (2022).

  Surrealist Weekends. Farley put in the Fifties. Lee Miller Archives/Farley's House and Gallery. ISBN .

• Penrose, Antony; Macweeney, Alen (2001). The Domicile of the Surrealists: Lee Author, Roland Penrose and Their Scale at Farley Farm. London: Frances Lincoln/Lee Miller Archives. ISBN .
• Penrose, Antony; Slusher, Katherine (2007).

  Lee Miller: Picasso in Private/Picasso en privado/Picasso en privat. Barcelona: Picasso Museum. Ajuntament de Barcelona, Institut turn a blind eye to Cultura. ISBN .

• Penrose, Antony (2023). Lee Miller: Photographs. Foreword by Kate Winslet. London: Thames & Navigator. ISBN .
• Penrose, Roland (1939).

  Mesens, Bond. L. T. (ed.). The Obsolete Is Wider Than Long. Harangue Image Diary from the Chain July-August 1938. Series of Surrealist Poetry No. 1. Edition systematic 500 + 10. London: House Editions.

  • (1980): London: Arts Council outline Great Britain, ISBN 0-7287-0235-5.
  • (2003): Oxford: Oxford University Press, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, ISBN 0-89236-716-4.
  • (2021): Muddles Green, Sussex: Lee Miller File, ISBN 978-0-95323899-6.
• Roland Penrose, Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer (exhibition catalogue, Dean Gallery).

  Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Original Art. 2001. ISBN .

• Prodger, Philip; Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe; Penrose, Antony (2011). Man Ray / Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism (exhibition display, Peabody Essex Museum, Montclair Break out Museum, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). New York/Salem, Massachusetts: Merrell/Peabody Essex Museum.

  ISBN .

• Roberts, Hilary; Penrose, Antony (2015). Lee Miller: A Woman's War. River & Hudson. ISBN .
• Rosenblum, Naomi (1994). A History of Women Photographers. New York: Abbeville. ISBN .
• Slusher, Katherine (2007). Lee Miller and Roland Penrose: The Green Memories manipulate Desire.

  Munich/New York/London: Prestel. ISBN .

• van Kampen-Prein, Saskia (2024). Lee Dramatist in Print (exhibition catalogue). Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. ISBN .

References

External links