| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Lee Miller

Page history last edited by Thomas Kutzli 3 years, 6 months ago

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.

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 Eluard, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, and alice_b_toklas. She appeared as a statue in one film, Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930).

 

 

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. 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).

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.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Miller had separated from Bey and was living in 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 accredited to 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.

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

 

When she left Man Ray, he made an object with her eye (this was all he had left of her) and called it "Object to be distructed". Some friends of him took the title at the word and destroyed it. He made it anew and called it "Indistructable Object.

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.