25 January 2025
The biopic about American photojournalist Lee Miller, whose images from the Normandy fronts and concentration camps have greatly influenced the Second World War’s historical record, was released on October 9, 2024. What if I told you Lee Miller initially wanted to be a painter and modeled for a while before finding her way through surrealist photography? Let me share with you her story.
Lee Miller was born on April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, in the state of New York. She was the second of three children. Her father, Theodore Miller, started early on to take stereoscopic photographs of his family, especially Lee Miller, when she was young.
In 1925, Lee Miller moved to Paris to study costume and design but returned a year later in New York to join an experimental drama program. She finally decided to leave for New York City to take drawing and painting classes. When she was 19, she was almost run over by a car on a Manhattan street. Luckily, Condé Nast, the current publisher of Vogue, avoided the accident. He was so amazed by Lee’s beauty that he immediately offered her to model for his magazine. On March 15, 1927, Lee Miller appeared with a blue hat and pearls on the cover of Vogue. That incident launched Lee Miller’s modeling career, and she would become a popular model working with famous American photographers.
She eventually continued to draw but found photography delivering her message more efficiently. She admitted in 1946, during Ona Munson’s radio show, “I wanted to be an artist, a painter more precisely. I went to Italy for a summer to study. I saw every ruins and pictures in the country. […] It despaired me to give the whole thing up […] because it seemed every pictures and paintings have been made in every possible ways.” Since everything has been made, photography would be her way to express herself.
In order to perfect her photographic skills, Lee Miller traveled to Paris intending to apprentice with the surrealist photographer Man Ray.
“When I met [him] in Paris, I asked him to take me on as a pupil. He said he never accepted pupils, but I guess he fell for me. We lived together for three years and I learned a lot—about photography”, explained Miller in Vogue.
This way, Lee became his collaborators and, later, his lover and muse. They both created together and rediscovered the photographic technique of solarisation because of an accident:
“whilst Lee was developing some work something, perhaps a mouse, made Lee jump, engaging her instinct to turn on the light at a vital stage. Knowing what she had done she quickly turned the light straight back off. The effect that resulted was a reversal of the tonality of the photograph—the dark areas became light and vice versa….”
Negatives were to remain in a dark room during the print period. Nevertheless, their sudden exposure to bright light would cause the photographic print to be wholly or partially reversed. Thus, this phenomenon would make appear dark spots in light areas and light spots in dark areas.
During her time in Paris, Lee Miller continued to work alongside Man Ray and on her own. She also spent time with the surrealist artist group. There, she met various artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Eluard, and Jean Cocteau. In 1930, she appeared in the movie The Blood of a Poet, realized by Jean Cocteau as the Venus of Milo. Two years later, Lee Miller left Man Ray and returned to New York to work more independently. She started a portrait and commercial photography studio with her younger brother, Erik. Meanwhile, she started to exhibit her pictures in various galleries and museums. She met Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian businessman, at a soirée and married him straight away. They both lived in Cairo for a while until 1937. Then, Lee Miller decided to go back to Europe.
At the start of World War II, Lee Miller had moved to England close to London with the surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose. In 1940, she ignored all the pleas from friends and family asking her to go back to the United States. She then worked as a photojournalist for Vogue to document the Blitz in London.
Since the British Army did not allow her as a female photographer, she managed to be accredited with the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications in December 1942. During this time, she took portraits of nurses, especially those on the front lines and prisoners.
“I became, I think, the first woman war correspondent. I was there as a photographer, not as a writer; you know, the old cliché—one picture is worth a thousand words.“
In 1944, Lee Miller was sent to Saint-Malo, in Brittany, to report what she was told to be a “newly liberated town.” She sadly discovered the city was still heavily fought over. Though Miller’s military accreditation did not allow her to approach front lines, she preferred to stay and tried to capture as much from the Battle of Saint-Malo as she could.
“The landing craft got a signal in mid-Channel to go to Saint Malo. I was supposed to be covering something quite peaceful, but when we got there, there was a terrible siege and battle. I got some terrifying photographs of the first jelly bombs. I was awfully scared, but I said to myself, ‘Nobody made you come here.’ ”
Lee Miller pictures were also illustrated with a description and a journal she would write during her time in France. Their words would share her fears, especially the horrors of dead bodies and destroyed cities. Her photographs included the first recorded use of napalm. However, she got caught by the military authorities and was put under temporary house arrest.
After her detention, she teamed up with American photojournalist David E. Scherman on many meaningful events, such as the Liberation of Paris, the Battle of Alsace, and the horrors of Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Their collaboration would result in the famous picture of Lee Miller bathing in Hitler’s Munich apartment on April 30, 1945, the same day of his suicide. In June 1945, Vogue published her pictures in “Believe It” showing all the horrific dead bodies of Nazi concentration camps.
In 1947, Lee Miller got married to Roland Penrose and gave birth to their son, Antony Penrose. They all moved to Farley Farm House in England, where it became a sort of “place-to-be” for their surrealist artists friends. Though the aftermaths of war remained in Miller’s head, she suffered from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Disorder Syndrome) and postpartum depression, along with alcohol issues. During the fifties, Miller almost gave up photography and turned to cooking. Food writer Ninette Lyon would write during her visit to Farley Farm:
“The Penroses live at the centre of the world they love—that of art and artists—in London and on a Sussex farm at Muddles Green, Chiddingly. Here Lee Penrose cooks, amusingly, inventively, for guests, in a large pleasant kitchen, surrounded by Picassos, by cookbooks from all over the world, and the newest kitchen gadgets.”
Lee Miller died in 1977 from lung cancer. After her death, her son Antony Penrose and his wife discovered all her pictures and journals in the house attic and started archiving her life. Antony Penrose would later admit she never talked about her past life to him, and they had a complicated relationship throughout his life. In 1985, he published The Lives of Lee Miller and started to exhibit her works around the world.