The Many Lives of Lee Miller, Photographer & War Correspondent
By Elodie Barnes | On November 8, 2024 | Updated November 9, 2024 | Comments (0)
Lee Miller (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977) was an American photographer and war correspondent. For many years she was known as the muse and lover of Surrealist artist Man Ray.
She was extraordinarily talented in her own right, moving with ease from the fashion circles of New York, to the Surrealist circles of Paris, to front-line photography in World War II.
Her life and work has been painstakingly documented and promoted by her son Antony Penrose, and most recently has been the subject of a 2023 film produced by and starring Kate Winslet.
Early life and education
Elizabeth Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. Her mother, Florence, was a nurse and her father Theodore was an engineer. She had two brothers: John (1905) and Erik (1910).
Theodore was a keen amateur photographer, and owned both a Kodak Brownie camera and a home darkroom. He taught Lee the basics of photography while she was just a girl. She was also his favorite model, and he took dozens of photographs of her, her friends, and her brothers over the years.
Despite having this loving family, Lee’s childhood was a difficult one. At age seven, while visiting relatives, she was raped by a family friend; this left her traumatized and suffering from a sexually transmitted disease. In the days before penicillin, the only treatment was douching with dichloride of mercury. As a nurse, it fell to Florence to administer these treatments, an experience which was horrendous for both her and Lee.
A few years later, Lee endured another tragedy when her teenage sweetheart died of heart failure while out on a lake in a rowing boat.
As a result, Lee struggled in school and was expelled several times. She did, however, show an interest in the theatre, and in an attempt to encourage her pursue something worthwhile, her parents agreed to send her to the L’École Medgyés pour la Technique du Théâtre in Paris for seven months.
She studied set design and lighting, but, as her son later wrote, she was “not one of the school’s star pupils. She was eighteen, gregarious, fabulously beautiful in the exactly the style of the period, and far more interested in celebrating her newfound freedom than in formal studies. Informally, what she was learning was what it meant to be a fully emancipated woman in charge of her own destiny.”
Lee returned to New York in 1926, where she attended the Experimental Theatre at Vassar College, studying Dramatic Production under Hallie Flannigan.
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Modeling in New York City
Lee’s career as a fashion model began that winter, when the publishing magnate Condé Nast reputedly saved her from being hit by oncoming traffic as she tried to cross the road in Manhattan. Impressed by her good looks, he offered her a job as a model for Vogue.
She was on the cover of both the British and American March 1927 editions. Subsequently, she worked with some of the greatest fashion photographers of the time including Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene.
Lee was hugely successful as a model, but quickly decided that she would “rather take a picture than be one.”
She abandoned modeling altogether when, in July 1928, a photograph taken of her by Edward Steichen was used as a advertisement for Kotex sanitary towels. At the time, feminine hygiene was considered far too personal and delicate to discuss in public, and after the image was the focal point of a massive nationwide advertising campaign, Lee found herself out on a limb — though also proud of the scandal it had caused.
On the other side of the camera in Paris
Lee moved to Paris in 1929, and sought out the Surrealist artist Man Ray. For several years she was his muse, lover, confidant, and collaborator, and she also established her own photographic studio in the city. Her portrait photography was highly sought after by writers, artists, socialites, and royalty — she even photographed the pet lizard of a French socialite.
However, it was her Surrealist photographs that are probably best known from this period. Alongside Man Ray, she experimented with juxtaposition — the technique of combining two elements within the same photo — and solarization, which partially reverses the positive and negative spaces of a photo, producing halo-like outlines that emphasize both light and shadow.
Even outside of the studio, her work had a quirky style. Later, her son Antony wrote, “The thing that became her distinctive, Surrealist style was what I call the ‘found image.’ She takes a photograph of, perhaps, an everyday occurrence, and she does it in such a way that it becomes an image that is containing ‘the marvelous.’”
While in Paris, Lee became part of the Surrealist circle of artists, including Paul and Nusch Éluard, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, and Joan Miró.
According to Antony, “When Lee arrived in Paris she had, in a way, been a Surrealist for some time — before the movement even had a name — because she had that determination to pursue her life free of the constraints of society which the Surrealists were already rebelling against. They wanted to create a new world which was not governed by religion or law or whatever…The Surrealist movement was going in tremendous force, and she was ready-made for it, and it for her.”
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New York and Egypt
She and Man Ray separated in 1932. Lee returned to New York to establish another studio there with her younger brother Erik. She specialized in advertising and celebrity portraits, including photographs of actresses Lilian Harvey and Gertrude Lawrence, and continued to experiment with Surrealist styles and techniques.
Her work was included in Julian Levy’s exhibition Modern European Photographers in 1932, and he subsequently gave her a one-woman show which brought her work to the attention of the art world. Soon afterwards, she was listed by Vanity Fair as one of the “most distinguished living photographers.”
She married the wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934, and moved with him to Cairo. She became fascinated with the idea of desert travel, and photographed the pyramids, desert, villages and ruins.
The photographs show a sense of dislocation, perhaps drawn from her experiences as an expatriate, and her best-known Egyptian image, Portrait of Space, 1937, views the desert through a torn fly screen door, turning it into a dream-like, Surrealist space.
Lee continued to travel to Europe, and during a return visit to Paris in 1937 she met Roland Penrose, a Surrealist artist. They began an affair, and in 1939 she officially left Bey and moved with Penrose to London.
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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
See also: 8 Female Journalists of the World War II Era
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Grim Glory: The World War II Years
In London, Lee met Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue. It was a connection that would prove vital for both Lee and for the magazine when, in 1940, Lee photographed London during and after the Blitz. Vogue published these photos, along with several photo essays by Lee about the Auxiliary Territorial Service.
It not only gave Lee an outlet for her photography in a new country and with a new subject, but it also helped to change Vogue’s reputation from solely a luxury fashion magazine — an indulgence that wasn’t much in demand during the war years — to a magazine that also published serious news.
Lee also published her images in a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941).
By 1943 she had become an accredited war correspondent through Condé Nast Publications, one of the very few women to do so, and in 1944 teamed up with Life photojournalist David E. Scherman.
She became the first female photojournalist to follow the US Army as it advanced on the front lines, and photographed major events such as the battle of Saint-Malo, the Liberation of Paris, and the liberation of both the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. She also taught herself to write articles, and the pieces that accompanied the photographs in print were almost always her own.
Lee was unsure whether the photos from the concentration camps would be publishable, given the horrific subject matter, but she sent them back to Vogue with a telegram: “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.” In June 1945, American Vogue printed the photos under the title, “Believe It.”
In 1945, she traveled throughout Eastern and Central Europe, documenting the horrific aftermath of the war on mostly ordinary people, and had an eye for the detail of combat that her male counterparts often overlooked.
As Meredith Herndon wrote for The Smithsonian, “Miller’s eye for Surrealist elements resulted in haunting photos that juxtaposed images of ordinary beauty with violence and destruction.”
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After the war
Lee married Roland Penrose in 1947, and gave birth to their son Antony at the age of forty. The family moved out of London to Farleys, a farm in the East Sussex countryside.
She continued to cover fashion, art, and celebrity culture for Vogue, and Farleys became known as a gathering place for the Surrealists. Many of Lee’s more intimate (and now iconic) photographs, of friends including Man Ray, Picasso, Eileen Agar, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, were taken here.
Sadly, she suffered from severe (and at that time undiagnosed) post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifested in alcoholism and depression, and never spoke of her war work to her son, Antony.
In the early 1950s, Lee moved away from professional photography. Her final tongue-in-cheek piece for Vogue, “Working Guests” (1953), showed major art world figures (such as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then the director of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC) feeding the pigs at Farleys.
Last years
In the last two decades of her life, Lee managed what her son would later call “the most astonishing achievement of her whole career … self-recovery … somehow she found the strength to get her drinking under control.”
A large part of this recovery came through cooking. Lee had given up photography, but she still longed for a creative outlet, and sent herself to the Cordon Bleu cookery school in Paris for six months.
Cooking, her son wrote, was “a kind of displacement activity for the demons that must have been rushing around inside her head all the time.” She became an award-winning cook, known for her Surrealism-inspired dishes such as green chicken and blue fish.
Lee died at Farleys in July 1977 of cancer at the age of seventy.
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Legacy: Redefining femininity
After Lee Millers’s death, Antony and his wife discovered some sixty thousand negatives and twenty thousand photographic prints, along with contact sheets, writings, and documents, all boxed up in the attic at Farleys.
From the 1980s, Antony worked to archive and promote her photographic work, which had been largely forgotten by the art world. Farleys is now the home of the Lee Miller Archive, along with a gallery which hosts rotating exhibitions.
Her work has also been shown in several major retrospectives, including at the Imperial War Museum and V&A Museum in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico.
Most recently, her war work has been the focus of the 2023 film Lee, produced by and starring Kate Winslet. Years of research went into making the film, along with a great deal of collaboration with Antony, and Kate Winslet reportedly spent days in the archives at Farleys.
According to Antony, “Other attempts to make a feature film about Lee had failed in the past, but this one succeeded…it owes much of its force and integrity to being a film about a women made by women.” On Lee, Kate Winslet said, “I think we live in a time when femininity is starting to mean something new, but Lee was already redefining femininity as resilience and power and courage and tenacity.”
Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at Elodie Rose Barnes.
More about Lee Miller’s work
- Women at War: The National WWII Museum
- Photographer Lee Miller’s Second World War
- Lee Miller Archives
Further reading:
- Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera by Carolyn Burke (2006)
- Lee Miller’s War: Beyond D-Day by Antony Penrose (2020)
- The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose (2021)
- Lee Miller: Fashion in Wartime Britain by Robin Muir and Amber Butchart
(Lee Miller Archives Publishing, 2021) - Lee Miller: Photographs by Antony Penrose and Kate Winslet (2023)
- Lee Miller Man Ray: Fashion, Love, War by Victoria Noel-Johnson (2023)
- Lee Miller: The True Story (Sky Original – Kate Winslet and Antony Penrose
discussing the film Lee) on YouTube
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