"an American free spirit wrapped in the body of a Greek goddess." - photojournalist John PhillipsElizabeth "Lee" Miller [1907-1977]
Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller (23 April 1907 - 21 July 1977) was an American photographer. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York State in 1907, she was a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris to become a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she became an acclaimed war correspondent and photojournalist.
'Lee Miller Wearing Yraide Sailcloth Overalls' 1930
Model
Her father, Theodor Miller, an engineer and businessman, introduced Lee to photography. She was his model--many pictures in the nude--and he also showed her technical aspects of the art. At age 19 she was stopped from walking in front of a car on a Manhattan street by magazine publisher Condé Nast, thus launching her modeling career. For the next two years, she was one of the most sought after models in New York, photographed by the likes of Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst. Her allure was captured in the words of the photojournalist John Phillips, who called her "an American free spirit wrapped in the body of a Greek goddess." And in fact, she was a woman of as much substance as style. Miller's picture advertising a female hygienic product (Kotex) caused a scandal.
Lee Miller as 'Armless Female Statue' in Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet 1930Paris
In 1929 she traveled to Paris with the intention of learning photography from the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Although he first tried to demur, insisting that he did not take students, Miller soon became his photography assistant, as well as his lover and muse. While she was in Paris, she began her own photographic studio. Together with Man Ray, she invented the photographic technique of solarisation. She was a major participant in the surrealist movement, with her witty images. Amongst her circle of friends were Pablo Picasso, Paul Éluard, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas. She appeared in one film, Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930).
New York
After leaving Man Ray and Paris in 1932, she returned to New York and established a portrait and commercial photography studio with her brother Erik as her business partner, working in fashion, advertising and celebrity portraiture. Among her portrait clients were artist Joseph Cornell and the African-American cast of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934).
Portrait of Space, frame 4, final version, 1937, Near Siwa EgyptEgypt
In 1934, she abandoned her studio to marry Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey who had come to New York to buy equipment for the Egyptian Railways. Although she did not work as a professional photographer during this period, the photographs she took while living in Egypt with Bey are regarded as some of her most striking surrealist images. By 1937, Lee had grown bored with her life in Cairo and she returned to Paris, where she was to meet her future husband, the surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose.
World War II
A photograph by Scherman of Miller in the bathtub of Adolf Hitler's house in Munich, 1945
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Miller had separated from Bey and was living in Hampstead, London when the bombing of that city began. Ignoring pleas from friends and family that she should return to the US, Miller embarked on a new career in photojournalism as the official photographer for Vogue documenting the Blitz and was recruited by her friend Kitty Bowler to help teach at the Osterley Park Guerrilla Training School, where she and Roland taught camouflage to Home Guardsmen, civilians and soldiers alongside other anarchist and communist revolutionaries such as Wintringham and Orwell. When Penrose was inducted into the regular army and took the Camouflage training school to Norwich, Lee was accredited into the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from 1944. She teamed up with David E. Scherman, a Life Magazine correspondent on many assignments. Miller travelled to France less than a month after D-Day and recorded the first use of napalm at the battle of St. Malo, the liberation of Paris, the battle for Alsace, and the horror of the Nazi concentration camps when the victims were liberated. A photograph by Scherman of Miller in the bathtub of Adolf Hitler's house in Munich is particularly well-known.
During this time, Miller photographed a child in a Vienna Hospital who was suffering after receiving black market pharmaceuticals. Author Graham Greene was influenced by this photo when he wrote the screenplay "The Third Man".
Man Ray, Electricity - Lee Miller 1931England
After the war she appeared exhausted, drank, and was uncertain about her future. She travelled doing post-war assignments in Denmark and Hungary. She met Penrose again in 1946, and she returned with him to the United States where she visited Man Ray in California. After she conceived her son, she divorced Bey and, on May 3, 1947 married Penrose. In September 1947 they had a son, Antony Penrose. In 1949, they bought Farley Farm House in Sussex. During the 1950s and 1960s, Farley Farm became a sort of Mecca for visiting artists such as Picasso, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Jean Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, and Max Ernst. While Miller did the occasional photo shoot for Vogue, she soon put her camera down for good except for an occasional picture of visitors. She took up gourmet cooking, but appeared depressed. Her son described it later as a "downward spiral" that may have been accelerated by her husband's long affair with the trapez artist Diane Deriaz. She rarely talked about her war experiences.
Miller died from cancer at Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, Sussex in 1977, aged 70. She was cremated, and her ashes spread through her herb garden at Farley Farm House.
Legacy
For the last 30 years of her life, Miller did virtually nothing to promote her work. Nor did her husband Roland Penrose, although he was a noted collector and promoter of surrealist art, and the co-founder the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. That Miller's work is known today is mainly due to the efforts of her son Antony, who has been studying, conserving, and promoting his mother's work since the early 1980s. Her pictures are accessible at the Lee Miller Archive.In 2005 her life story was turned into a musical Six Pictures Of Lee Miller with music and lyrics by British composer Jason Carr, and book by Edward Kemp, it premiered at The Chichester Festival Theatre (also in Sussex). Also in 2005 Carolyn Burke's biography, Lee Miller, A Life, was published in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf and in the U.K. by Bloomsbury.
