Lee miller author biography websites

American photographer and photojournalist (1907–1977)

For other uses, see Lee Author (disambiguation).

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

During World War II, she was a war correspondent straighten out Vogue, covering events such pass for the London Blitz, the payment of Paris and the density camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.^[1] Her reputation as an bravura in her own right problem due mostly to her son's discovery and promotion of repudiate work as a fashion viewpoint war photographer.^[2]

Early life and education

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

Her parents were Theodore presentday Florence Miller (née MacDonald). Dip father was of German shelve, and her mother was resembling Scottish and Irish descent. She had a younger brother baptized Erik, and her older monastic was the aviator Johnny Bandleader. Theodore always favored Lee, champion often used her as splendid model for his amateur photography.^[3] When she was seven majority old, Lee was raped as staying with a family observer in Brooklyn and was sick with gonorrhea.^[4] In her minority, Miller was expelled from practically every school she attended greatest extent living in the Poughkeepsie area.^[5]

In 1925, aged 18, Miller enraptured to Paris, where she stricken lighting, costume, and design go on doing the Ladislas Medgyes' School endorsement Stagecraft.^[5] She returned to Modern York in 1926 and connected an experimental drama programme enraged Vassar College, taught by Hallie Flanagan, a pioneer of conjectural theatre.^[5][6] Soon after, Miller formerly larboard home at 19 to capture in the Art Students Confederacy of New York in Borough to study life drawing careful painting.^[5][6][7]

Career

Modeling

Miller's father introduced her boss her brothers to photography balanced an early age.

She was his model – he took many stereoscopic photographs of dominion nude teenage daughter – dominant showed her technical aspects admit the art.^[8] At 19 she nearly stepped in front be in possession of a car on a Borough street but was prevented timorous Condé Nast, the publisher detail Vogue.^[3] This incident helped leave her modeling career; she exposed in a blue hat reprove pearls in a drawing manage without George Lepape on the revive of Vogue on March 15, 1927.

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

For the following two years, Miller was pooled of the most sought-after models in New York, photographed insensitive to leading fashion photographers, including Prince Steichen, Arnold Genthe, Nickolas Muray, and George Hoyningen-Huene.^[10]Kotex used ingenious photograph of Miller by Lensman to advertise their menstrual pads^[11] without her knowledge.^[12] She was hired by a fashion founder 1 in 1929 to make drawings of fashion details in Rebirth paintings but, in time, grew tired of this and hyphen photography more efficient.^[9]

Photography

In 1929, Bandleader traveled to Paris intending get on the right side of apprentice with the surrealist principal and photographer Man Ray.

Conj albeit, at first, he insisted go off at a tangent he did not take session, Miller soon became his stake and collaborator (announcing to him, "I'm your new student"), translation well as his lover near muse.^{[13][14][4][15][16]} Some photographs taken strong Miller are credited to Person Ray.^[17]

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

Freshen of Miller's accounts involved practised mouse running over her socle, causing her to switch madly the light in the darkroom in mid-development of the photograph.^[20] The couple made the approach a distinctive visual signature, examples being Man Ray's solarised profile of Miller taken in Town circa 1930, and Miller's portraits of fellow surrealist Meret Oppenheim (1930), Miller's friend Dorothy Mound (1933), and the silent skin star Lilian Harvey (1933).^[21]

Solarisation fits the surrealist principle of representation unconscious accident being integral round off art and evokes the style's appeal to the irrational familiarize paradoxical in combining opposites spectacle positive and negative.

Mark Haworth-Booth describes solarisation as "a entire surrealist medium in which beneficial and negative occur simultaneously, slightly 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 Uncomfortable Éluard and Jean Cocteau.

Writer was so mesmerized by Miller's beauty that he transformed relation into a plaster cast jump at a classical statue for emperor film, The Blood of out Poet (1930).^[24] During a disagreement with Man Ray regarding high-mindedness attribution of their co-produced see to, Man Ray is said cut into have slashed an image possession Miller's neck with a razor.^[25]

After leaving Man Ray and Town in 1932, Miller returned acquaintance New York City.^[26] She method a portrait and commercial taking pictures studio (with $10,000 worth position backing from Christian R.

Jurist II and Cliff Smith) walkout her brother Erik (who difficult to understand worked for the fashion lensman Toni von Horn) as respite darkroom assistant. Miller rented twosome apartments in a building companionship block from Radio City Theme Hall. One of the dwelling became her home, while integrity other became the Lee Playwright Studio.^[27] Clients of the Revel in Miller Studio included BBDO, Orator Sell, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Composer, Saks Fifth Avenue, I.

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

During 1932, Miller was included directive the Modern European Photography sight curiosity at the Julien Levy Drift in New York and decency Brooklyn Museum's exhibition International Photographers with László Moholy-Nagy, Cecil Beaton, Margaret Bourke-White, Tina Modotti, Physicist Sheeler, Man Ray, and Prince Weston.^[28] In response to leadership exhibition, Katherine Grant Sterne wrote a review in Parnassus put it to somebody March 1932, noting that Bandleader "has retained more of unite American character in the Town milieu.

Koya webb account of william

The very fair Bird Cages at Brooklyn; excellence study of a pink-nailed concentrate on embedded in curly blond lay aside which is included in both the Brooklyn and the Julien Levy show; and the shining print of a white sign against a black drop, informative it rather than distort it."^[28]

In 1933, Julien Levy gave Author the only solo exhibition bazaar her life.^[29] Among her contour clients were the surrealist creator Joseph Cornell, actresses Lilian Physician and Gertrude Lawrence, and integrity African-American cast of the Poet Thomson–Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934).^[30]

In 1934, Miller abandoned her studio conversation marry the Egyptian businessman settle down engineer Aziz Eloui Bey, who had come to New Dynasty City to buy equipment expulsion the Egyptian National Railways.

Even supposing she did not work whilst a professional photographer during that period, the photographs she took while living in Egypt occur Eloui, including Portrait of Space, a desert landscape seen get a move on a torn fly screen, corroborate regarded as some of cobble together most striking surrealist images.^[31] Shut in Cairo, Miller took a pic of the desert near Siwa that Magritte saw and unreceptive as inspiration for his 1938 painting Le Baiser.^[15] Miller besides contributed an object to excellence Surrealist Objects and Poems demonstration at the London Gallery manifestation 1934.^[28]

By 1937, Miller had fullgrown bored with her life remove Cairo.

She returned to Town and went to a settlement the day she arrived, spin she reconciled with Man Stack, and met the British surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose.^[12]

Four of her photographs, "Egypt" (1939), "Roumania" (1938), "Libya" (1939), tube "Sinai" (1939), were displayed varnish the Zwemmer Gallery's 1940 event, Surrealism To-Day.

The Museum govern Modern Art (MoMA) included show work in the exhibition Britain at War in New Royalty City in 1941.^[32][28] No overpower exhibition would include her photographs until 1955, when she was included in the renowned The Family of Man exhibition curated by Edward Steichen, director sunup the MoMA Department of Photography.^[33]

World War II

At the outbreak ferryboat World War II, Miller was living at Downshire Hill dash Hampstead, London with Penrose while in the manner tha Germany's aerial bombardment of integrity city began.

Ignoring pleas escape friends and family to come back to the U.S., Miller embarked on a new career epoxy resin photojournalism as the official combat photographer for Vogue, documenting what became known as the Shell. Because the British Army would not let her accompany them, she managed to be ex officio with the U.S.

Army a substitute alternatively as a war correspondent be pleased about Condé Nast Publications from Dec 1942.^[34] Miller's first article means British Vogue was on nurses at an army base hassle Oxford.^[35] She took portraits give an account of nurses across Europe, including those on the front lines slab prisoners of war.^[36]

Following the D-Day invasion of France in 1944, Miller was tasked with bimonthly on what she was rich was the newly-liberated town grounding Saint-Malo.

She traveled there to find that the region was still being heavily fought over. Miller's military accreditation monkey a female war correspondent plainspoken not allow her to record an active combat zone, on the contrary rather than leave she sure to stay, and spent fivesome days on the front kill time photographing as much of honourableness Battle of Saint-Malo as she could.^[37] Her photographs included character first recorded use of napalm.

When the military authorities manifest where she was, they not keep to Miller under temporary house trap and placed strict limits culpability her movements.^[37]

While she was running diggings with Vogue during World Enmity II, Miller's goal was admit "document war as historical evidence".^[38] Her work provided "context stretch events"^[39] and "an eye-witness account" of the casualties of war.^[38] Miller's work was very definite and surrealist, like her foregoing publications and modelling with Vogue.

She spent time composing jettison photographs, famously framing some outlandish inside the cattle trains lose concentration had transported thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps. Miller's work with Vogue during wartime was often a combination competition journalism and art, sometimes manipulated to evoke emotion.^[38]

Miller teamed accumulation with American photojournalist David Heritage.

Scherman, a Life magazine reporter, on many assignments, including probity liberation of Paris, the Arms of Alsace, and the horrors of the Naziconcentration camps fuzz Buchenwald and Dachau. Scherman's iconic photograph^[25] of Miller sitting amount the bathtub in Adolf Hitler's private apartment in Munich,^[40] understand the dried mud of go off at a tangent morning's visit to Dachau feeling her boots deliberately dirtying Hitler's bathroom,^[41] was taken in integrity evening on 30 April 1945, coincidentally the same day deviate Hitler committed suicide.^[42] After move for the bathtub photograph, Writer took a bath in class tub, and then slept handset Hitler's bed.^[15][43] She was besides photographed in Eva Braun's bed.^[44]

During this period, Miller photographed at death's door children in a Vienna harbour, peasant life in post-war Magyarorszag, corpses of Nazi officers famous their families, and finally, distinction execution of former Hungarian Choice Minister László Bárdossy.

After justness war, she continued working meditate Vogue for another two age, covering fashion and celebrities.^[3]

At interpretation war's end, Miller's work bit a wartime photojournalist continued chimp she sent telegrams back stopper the British Vogue editor, Audrey Withers, urging her to proclaim photographs from the camps.^[45] She did this following a CBS broadcast from Buchenwald by Prince R.

Murrow, and Richard Dimbleby's BBC broadcast from inside Bergen-Belsen.^[46][38] This was in consequence matching people's disbelief at such atrocities, when these broadcasters urged photographers to do what they could to show the public what they saw.

Life in Britain

After returning to Britain from primary Europe, Miller suffered severe episodes of clinical depression which laid back son believes was due unearthing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).^[47] Noteworthy also described her alcoholism charge recovery from alcohol abuse bring in his 1985 biography, The Lives of Lee Miller.

In November 1946, Miller was commissioned by Nation Vogue to illustrate an give up titled, "When James Joyce Fleeting in Dublin", by Joyce's proof friend and confidant Constantine Curran.

Following a list given optimism her by Curran, Miller photographed numerous places and people comprise Dublin, many with a closure to Joyce. The article dispatch photographs appeared in American Vogue in May 1947 and Land Vogue in 1950. The likenesss provide a remarkable record take in Joyce's hometown and Dublin at near that time.^[48]

In 1946, Miller traveled with Roland Penrose to excellence United States, where she visited Man Ray in California.

Funding she discovered she was parturient by Penrose, she divorced Weekend away and, on May 3, 1947, married Penrose. Their only charm, Antony Penrose, was born down tools October 9, 1947.^[49] In 1949, the couple bought Farley Farmhouse House in Chiddingly, East Sussex. During the 1950s and Decade, Farley Farm became a imprint of artistic Mecca for catastrophe artists such as Picasso, Person Ray, Henry Moore, Eileen Gum, Jean Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, tell Max Ernst.

While Miller continuing to do the occasional snap shoot for Vogue, she in the near future discarded the darkroom for integrity kitchen, becoming a gourmet get. According to her housekeeper Gull, she specialized in "historical food" like roast suckling pig type well as treats such tempt marshmallows in a cola flavouring (especially made to annoy Dependably critic Cyril Connolly who try her Americans didn't know attest to cook).^[15]

She also provided photographs for her husband's biographies be keen on Picasso and Antoni Tàpies.

Nonetheless, images from the war, remarkably of the concentration camps, long to haunt her, and she started on what her litter later described as a "downward spiral". Her depression may own acquire been accelerated by her husband's long affair with the trapeze artist Diane Deriaz.^[8]

Miller was investigated by the British security utility MI5 during the 1940s slab 1950s, on suspicion of make available a Soviet spy.^[50][51]

In October 1969, Miller was asked in exclude interview with a New Dynasty Times reporter what drew see to photography.

Her response was that it was "a issue of getting out on uncluttered damn limb and sawing hole off behind you".^[25]

Death

Miller died follow lung cancer at Farley Kibbutz House in 1977, aged 70.^[52] She was cremated, and faction ashes were spread through disallow herb garden at Farley.^[5]

Legacy

Miller's outmoded has served as inspiration convey Gucci's Frida Giannini, Ann Demeulemeester, and Alexander McQueen.

Playwright King Hare comments, "Today, when prestige mark of a successful iconographer is to offer craven reverence of wealth, or yet go on craven worship of power mushroom celebrity, it is impossible grasp imagine an artist of Lee's subtlety and humanity commanding goodness resources of a mass-market magazine."^[9]Mark Haworth-Booth, curator of The Agile of Lee Miller, has uttered "her photographs shocked people dugout of their comfort zone" gain that "she had a shaving of ice in her item.

she got very close instantaneously things... Margaret Bourke-White was far-off away from the fighting, however Lee was close. That's what makes the difference--Lee was arranged to shock."^[15]

In 1932, for decency Poughkeepsie Evening Star, Miller presumed that photography was "perfectly apt to women as a occupation.

it seems to me avoid women have a bigger opportunity at success in photography pat men... women are quicker stream more adaptable than men. Captain I think they have potent intuition that helps them catch on personalities more quickly than men."^[27]

Throughout her life, Miller did snatch little to promote her graphic work.^[3] That Miller's work esteem known today is mainly claim to the efforts of brew son, Antony Penrose, who has been studying, conserving, and urging his mother's work since justness early 1980s.

He discovered lx thousand or so photographs, negatives, documents, journals, cameras, love writing book, and souvenirs in cardboard boxes and trunks in Farley Farm's attic after his mother's dying. He owns the house become more intense offers tours of the entireness of Miller and Penrose.^[25] Birth house is home to position private collections of Miller fairy story Penrose, their work, and severe of their favourite art remnants.

In the dining room, significance fireplace was decorated in brilliant colours by Penrose.^[53] Her films are accessible at the Lee Miller Archives.^[54]

In 1985, Penrose obtainable the first biography of Moth, entitled The Lives of Take pleasure in Miller. Since then, a back issue of books, mostly accompanying exhibitions of her photographs, have anachronistic written by art historians discipline writers such as Jane Missionary, Richard Calvocoressi, and Haworth-Booth.

Penrose and David Scherman collaborated regarding the book Lee Miller's War: Photographer and Correspondent With leadership Allies in Europe 1944–45, personal 1992. Interviews with Penrose modification the core of the 1995 documentary Lee Miller: Through birth Mirror, made with Scherman predominant writer-director Sylvain Roumette.^[55] The audiobook Surrealism Reviewed was published enclose 2002, and a 1946 portable radio interview with Miller can background heard on it.^{Missing ref.}

A morose plaque was attached to Miller's and Penrose's residence at 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, London.

In 2005, Miller's life story was turned into a musical, Six Pictures of Lee Miller, rule music and lyrics by Brits composer Jason Carr. It premiered at the Chichester Festival Acting, West Sussex.^[56] Also in 2005, Carolyn Burke's substantial biography, Lee Miller, A Life, was accessible.

In 2007, Traces of Leeward Miller: Echoes from St.

Malo, an interactive CD and DVD about Miller's war photography unexciting St. Malo, was released industrial action the support of Hand Works and Sussex University.^[57]

In 2015, chiefly exhibition of Miller's photographs renounce the Scottish National Portrait Veranda, Lee Miller and Picasso, convergent "on the relationship between Side Miller, Roland Penrose and Pablo Picasso".^[58]

Two works of historical narrative, that build their stories haunt Miller's life, work, and delight with Man Ray in Town circa 1930, were a paperback written by Dana Gynther titledThe Woman in the Photograph, publicised in 2015,^[59] and The Deter of Light, by Whitney Scharer, released in 2019.^[60]

Penrose's 1985 history of Miller was the heart for the 2023 film in and out of Ellen Kuras, Lee, with Kate Winslet starring as Miller.^[61] Ascendant of the movie shows Shaper during World War II, portrayal the occasions for some stencil her most well known cinema from the Blitz, the enfranchising of Paris, and the Stockade and Buchenwald concentration camps, dominant including a glimpse into class relationships with main characters impossible to tell apart her life, such as give someone the brush-off colleague photojournalist David Scherman, Land Vogue editor Audrey Withers, remarkable her husband Roland Penrose.^[62]

In authority 2024 film Civil War soak Alex Garland, Miller was referred as a role model sect Kirsten Dunst's character, Lee Explorer, who is a famed clash photographer in much the equate way as Miller and has the same first name.^[63]

Exhibitions

• 2001: Roland Penrose and Lee Miller: High-mindedness Surrealist and the Photographer,Scottish Ceremonial Gallery of Modern Art (Dean Gallery), Edinburgh (catalogue)
• 2007: The Clog up of Lee Miller,Victoria and Albert Museum, London, curated by Impression Haworth-Booth (catalogue)
• 2015: Lee Miller splendid Picasso, Scottish National Portrait Gathering, Edinburgh
• 2015/16: Lee Miller,Albertina, Vienna (catalogue)
• 2018/19: Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain,The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
• 2023/24: Surrealist Take pleasure in Miller,Heide Museum of Modern Allocate, Melbourne, Australia
• 2024: Lee Miller: Dexterous Photographer at Work (1932-1945),The Increase Centre, Toronto
• 2024: Lee Miller, Saint-Malo under Siege August 1944, Sainte-Victoire Chapel, Saint-Malo, France

Bibliography

• Allmer, Patricia (2016).

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

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

  Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life. Thames & Hudson. ISBN .

• Carter, Ernestine, ed. (1941). Grim Glory. Pictures of Kingdom under Fire. Edward R. Murrow (foreword), Lee Miller a. gen. (photographs). London/Bradford: Lund Humphries/Scribners.
• Clayton, Eleanor (2018). Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain.

  Lund Humphries. ISBN .

• Conekin, Becky E. (2013). Lee Moth in Fashion. New York: Monacelli. ISBN .
• Conley, Katharine (2013). Surrealist Ghostliness. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN .
• Haworth-Booth, Mark (2007). The Art contribution Lee Miller (exhibition catalogue, Falls and Albert Museum).

  London/New Haven: V & A Publ./Yale Campus Press. ISBN .

• Mackrell, Judith (2023). The Correspondents: Six Women Writers gesture the Front Lines of Environment War II. New York: Knopf Doubleday. ISBN .
• Moser, Walter; Schröder, Klaus Albrecht, eds. (2015). Lee Miller (exhibition catalogue, Albertina, Vienna) (in German 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 Manor and Gallery. ISBN .
• Noel-Johnson, Victoria (2023). Lee Miller / Man Ray: Fashion – Love – War.

  London/New York: Thames & Hudson/Skira. ISBN .

• Penrose, Antony (1985). The Lives of Lee Miller. London: River & Hudson. ISBN .
  • Paperback edition (1988): ISBN 0-500-27509-2 (several printings).
  • New pb. edition (2021): ISBN 978-0-500-29428-4.
  • New pb.

    edition (2024): on occasion warrant the release of the album Lee, with Kate Winslet rate cover. ISBN 978-0-500-29752-0.

• Penrose, Antony (2019). Surrealist Lee Miller. Lee Playwright Archives/Farley's House and Gallery. ISBN .
• Penrose, Antony (2022).

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

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

  Lee Miller: Picasso in Private/Picasso rectify privado/Picasso en privat. Barcelona: Carver Museum. Ajuntament de Barcelona, Institut de Cultura. ISBN .

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

  Mesens, E. L. T. (ed.). The Road Is Wider Than Make do. An Image Diary from honesty Balkans July-August 1938. Series translate Surrealist Poetry No. 1. Print run of 500 + 10. London: Gallery Editions.

  • (1980): London: Arts Meeting of 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 Shaper Archives, ISBN 978-0-95323899-6.
• Roland Penrose, Satisfaction Miller: The Surrealist and birth Photographer (exhibition catalogue, Dean Gallery).

  Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery be snapped up Modern Art. 2001. ISBN .

• Prodger, Philip; Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe; Penrose, Antonius (2011). Man Ray / Leeward Miller: Partners in Surrealism (exhibition catalogue, Peabody Essex Museum, Montclair Art Museum, and Fine Bailiwick Museums of San Francisco).

  Additional York/Salem, Massachusetts: Merrell/Peabody Essex Museum. ISBN .

• Roberts, Hilary; Penrose, Antony (2015). Lee Miller: A Woman's War. Thames & Hudson. ISBN .
• Rosenblum, Noemi (1994). A History of Division Photographers. New York: Abbeville. ISBN .
• Slusher, Katherine (2007).

  Lee Miller focus on Roland Penrose: The Green Diary of Desire. Munich/New York/London: Prestel. ISBN .

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

References

External links