A few weeks ago, I posted a piece about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – a character from history that featured in a Boomtown Rats song.
There’ll be more posts on characters from Rats song along in due course, but I also wanted to look at a few people from history who are perhaps even more obscure: people that have impressed me and I hope will impress you as well.
And today I thought I’d like to introduce you all to Lee Miller.
Lee Miller by George Hoyningen-Huene, 1932
Source: https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/7739/lessons-we-can-learn-from-lee-miller
Born in 1907, Miller had a troubled childhood. In her early career she became a celebrated model, appearing frequently in Vogue. Not satisfied, she gave it up and in 1929, travelled to Paris intent on working with the surrealist artist and photographer, Man Ray. Ray worked alone but as an early sign of who Miller was to become, she introduced herself to him with the words “I’m your new student”. She became Man Ray’s apprentice (and ‘muse’) and they worked so closely that in some cases specialists can’t tell whether a celebrated piece from this period was by Ray or by Miller.
One of the techniques they developed together is called solarisation, which was a process applied during the development of their photographs. Today, we can reproduce their solarized effects in digital photographs and I love to mess around adding solarized effects to some of my photos.
After working with semi-legendary artists of her era such as Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Miller returned alone to New York in 1932 and soon established an independent reputation as a professional photographer. In 1934 she married an Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey. Some of the photos she took in Egypt have such a strong resonance with my own experiences there – particularly in the deserts.
This is one of her best known images A portrait of space, taken on a trip to Siwa Oasis in the vast Western Desert.
Photo: the Lee Miller Archives
Her time in Egypt only lasted until 1937 when she returned to Paris and met the British surrealist, Roland Penrose. Clearly, Miller was looking for something that so far, she hadn’t found.
At the outbreak of war she did something that I find really remarkable for a woman at that point in history – she enrolled with the US Army as an official war reporter. Initially, she reported from the home front, but having travelled to France only a month after D-Day, she stayed close to the front line, being one of the first journalists into newly-liberated Paris and one of the first to document the concentration camps. One of Miller’s most iconic photographs from this period is her taking a bath in Hitler’s apartment in Munich. The focal point of this photo – it’s main statement - isn’t Lee, it’s her boots…..
David E Scherman, Lee Miller: The Woman in Hitler's Bathtub, Munich, 1945
Source: https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/7739/lessons-we-can-learn-from-lee-miller
….the dirt that is smeared all over Adolf’s bathmat, is mud from the concentration camp at Dachau.
After the war, Lee Miller returned to live with Penrose in Britain, and although she continued to take commissions for Vogue, she increasingly focussed on family, becoming a gourmet cook. She was even investigated by MI5 in the 1950s on suspicion of being a Soviet Spy. She died in 1970.
For me, Lee Miller’s life is remarkable – yes, she always seemed to court controversy, usually related to her love life - but she seems to have exhibited a determinism and self-reliance that I admire hugely. She was clearly her own woman and accomplished things in her life that she could not have achieved if she had obeyed the social conventions of her time. As a photographer, artist and individual, I find her astonishing.
That really is an astonishing life, for a host of reasons as you mention, Col Dog. Thanks for sharing.