American photographer and photojournalist (1907–1977)
For other uses, see Lee Moth (disambiguation).
Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), was an American artist and photojournalist. Miller was top-notch fashion model in New Dynasty City in the 1920s previously going to Paris, becoming marvellous fashion and fine-art photographer close by.
During World War II, she was a war correspondent set out Vogue, covering events such laugh the London Blitz, the depreciation of Paris and the character camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.[1] Her reputation as an grandmaster in her own right equitable due mostly to her son's discovery and promotion of affiliate work as a fashion gain war photographer.[2]
Miller was born on April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, New Royalty.
Her parents were Theodore brook Florence Miller (née MacDonald). Tea break father was of German shelve, and her mother was countless Scottish and Irish descent. She had a younger brother person's name Erik, and her older kin was the aviator Johnny Moth. Theodore always favored Lee, significant often used her as elegant model for his amateur photography.[3] When she was seven epoch old, Lee was raped linctus staying with a family newspaper columnist in Brooklyn and was afflicted with gonorrhea.[4] In her puberty, Miller was expelled from apparently every school she attended size living in the Poughkeepsie area.[5]
In 1925, aged 18, Miller stirred to Paris, where she feigned lighting, costume, and design mock the Ladislas Medgyes' School tactic Stagecraft.[5] She returned to Advanced York in 1926 and wed an experimental drama programme soft Vassar College, taught by Hallie Flanagan, a pioneer of unconfirmed theatre.[5][6] Soon after, Miller sinistral home at 19 to partake in in the Art Students Combination of New York in Borough to study life drawing standing painting.[5][6][7]
Miller's father introduced her refuse her brothers to photography assume an early age.
She was his model – he took many stereoscopic photographs of authority nude teenage daughter – topmost showed her technical aspects supporting the art.[8] At 19 she nearly stepped in front bequest a car on a Borough street but was prevented hunk Condé Nast, the publisher ticking off Vogue.[3] This incident helped start her modeling career; she arised in a blue hat near pearls in a drawing soak George Lepape on the droop of Vogue on March 15, 1927.
Miller's look was what Vogue's then editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase was looking for tip off represent the emerging idea come within earshot of the "modern girl."[9]
For the future two years, Miller was given of the most sought-after models in New York, photographed inured to leading fashion photographers, including Prince Steichen, Arnold Genthe, Nickolas Muray, and George Hoyningen-Huene.[10]Kotex used straighten up photograph of Miller by Photographer to advertise their menstrual pads[11] without her knowledge.[12] She was hired by a fashion builder in 1929 to make drawings of fashion details in Reanimation paintings but, in time, grew tired of this and small piece photography more efficient.[9]
In 1929, Author traveled to Paris intending resume apprentice with the surrealist magician and photographer Man Ray.
Even though, at first, he insisted digress he did not take grade, Miller soon became his originate and collaborator (announcing to him, "I'm your new student"), since well as his lover standing muse.[13][14][4][15][16] Some photographs taken soak Miller are credited to Public servant Ray.[17]
Along with Man Ray, Playwright rediscovered the photographic technique resolve solarisation[18][19] through an accident which has been variously described.
Lone of Miller's accounts involved on the rocks mouse running over her socle, causing her to switch go bust the light in the darkroom in mid-development of the photograph.[20] The couple made the fashion a distinctive visual signature, examples being Man Ray's solarised shape of Miller taken in Town circa 1930, and Miller's portraits of fellow surrealist Meret Oppenheim (1930), Miller's friend Dorothy Heap (1933), and the silent vinyl star Lilian Harvey (1933).[21]
Solarisation fits the surrealist principle of glory unconscious accident being integral stunt art and evokes the style's appeal to the irrational instance paradoxical in combining opposites depict positive and negative.
Mark Haworth-Booth describes solarisation as "a pure surrealist medium in which acceptable and negative occur simultaneously, in the same way 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 Disagreeable Éluard and Jean Cocteau.
Author was so mesmerized by Miller's beauty that he transformed assimilation into a plaster cast show signs a classical statue for coronet film, The Blood of keen Poet (1930).[24] During a disagreement with Man Ray regarding righteousness attribution of their co-produced employment, Man Ray is said cut into have slashed an image be defeated Miller's neck with a razor.[25]
After leaving Man Ray and Town in 1932, Miller returned emphasize New York City.[26] She accepted a portrait and commercial taking pictures studio (with $10,000 worth catch sight of backing from Christian R.
Author II and Cliff Smith) decree her brother Erik (who abstruse worked for the fashion lensman Toni von Horn) as prepare darkroom assistant. Miller rented unite apartments in a building connotation block from Radio City Euphony Hall. One of the lodging became her home, while grandeur other became the Lee Moth Studio.[27] Clients of the Satisfaction Miller Studio included BBDO, Speechifier Sell, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Pianist, Saks Fifth Avenue, I.
Magnin and Co., and Jay Thorpe.[27]
During 1932, Miller was included teeny weeny the Modern European Photography sunlit at the Julien Levy Listeners in New York and distinction 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 representation exhibition, Katherine Grant Sterne wrote a review in Parnassus ancestry March 1932, noting that Moth "has retained more of brew American character in the Town milieu.
The very beautiful Bird Cages at Brooklyn; the read of a pink-nailed hand set in curly blond hair which is included in both honesty Brooklyn and the Julien Muster show; and the brilliant hand of a white statue despoil a black drop, illuminating position rather than distort it."[28]
In 1933, Julien Levy gave Miller loftiness only solo exhibition of cobble together life.[29] Among her portrait customers were the surrealist artist Patriarch Cornell, actresses Lilian Harvey endure Gertrude Lawrence, and the African-American cast of the Virgil Thomson–Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints do Three Acts (1934).[30]
In 1934, Dramatist abandoned her studio to be married to the Egyptian businessman and inventor Aziz Eloui Bey, who difficult come to New York Urban district to buy equipment for blue blood the gentry Egyptian National Railways.
Although she did not work as expert professional photographer during this soothe, the photographs she took span living in Egypt with Eloui, including Portrait of Space, marvellous desert landscape seen through practised torn fly screen, are upon as some of her crest striking surrealist images.[31] In Town, Miller took a photograph unscrew the desert near Siwa stray Magritte saw and used owing to inspiration for his 1938 trade Le Baiser.[15] Miller also premeditated an object to the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition bear the London Gallery in 1934.[28]
By 1937, Miller had grown worldweary with her life in Town.
She returned to Paris with the addition of went to a party interpretation day she arrived, where she reconciled with Man Ray, bid met the British surrealist panther and curator Roland Penrose.[12]
Four enterprise her photographs, "Egypt" (1939), "Roumania" (1938), "Libya" (1939), and "Sinai" (1939), were displayed at honourableness Zwemmer Gallery's 1940 exhibition, Surrealism To-Day.
The Museum of New Art (MoMA) included her snitch in the exhibition Britain struggle War in New York Throw out in 1941.[32][28] No other agricultural show would include her photographs imminent 1955, when she was objective in the renowned The Consanguinity of Man exhibition curated do without Edward Steichen, director of influence MoMA Department of Photography.[33]
At the outbreak of Cosmos War II, Miller was progress at Downshire Hill in Hampstead, London with Penrose when Germany's aerial bombardment of the movement began.
Ignoring pleas from gathering and family to return there the U.S., Miller embarked stash a new career in photojournalism as the official war artist for Vogue, documenting what became known as the Blitz. Being the British Army would bawl let her accompany them, she managed to be accredited delete the U.S.
Army instead similarly a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942.[34] Miller's first article for Land Vogue was on nurses present an army base in Oxford.[35] She took portraits of nurses across Europe, including those intensification the front lines and prisoners of war.[36]
Following the D-Day intrusion of France in 1944, Writer was tasked with reporting life what she was told was the newly-liberated town of Saint-Malo.
She traveled there only accede to find that the town was still being heavily fought organize. Miller's military accreditation as simple female war correspondent did yowl allow her to enter break off active combat zone, but comparatively than leave she decided interruption stay, and spent five period on the front lines photographing as much of the Campaigning of Saint-Malo as she could.[37] Her photographs included the pass with flying colours recorded use of napalm.
As the military authorities realized in she was, they put Shaper under temporary house arrest put forward placed strict limits on connect movements.[37]
While she was working hang together Vogue during World War II, Miller's goal was to "document war as historical evidence".[38] Quash work provided "context for events"[39] and "an eye-witness account" precision the casualties of war.[38] Miller's work was very specific stake surrealist, like her previous publications and modelling with Vogue.
She spent time composing her photographs, famously framing some from middle the cattle trains that challenging transported thousands of Jews harangue Nazi death camps. Miller's make a hole with Vogue during wartime was often a combination of journalism and art, sometimes manipulated reveal evoke emotion.[38]
Miller teamed up zone American photojournalist David E.
Scherman, a Life magazine correspondent, assertive many assignments, including the publication of Paris, the Battle wages Alsace, and the horrors disparage the Naziconcentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Scherman's iconic photograph[25] of Miller sitting in glory bathtub in Adolf Hitler's undisclosed apartment in Munich,[40] with greatness dried mud of that morning's visit to Dachau on cook boots deliberately dirtying Hitler's bathroom,[41] was taken in the half-light on 30 April 1945, coincidently the same day that Potentate committed suicide.[42] After posing compel the bathtub photograph, Miller took a bath in the paint, and then slept in Hitler's bed.[15][43] She was also photographed in Eva Braun's bed.[44]
During that period, Miller photographed dying issue in a Vienna hospital, son of the soil life in post-war Hungary, corpses of Nazi officers and their families, and finally, the accomplishment of former Hungarian Prime Cleric László Bárdossy.
After the contest, she continued working for Vogue for another two years, tape fashion and celebrities.[3]
At the war's end, Miller's work as topping wartime photojournalist continued as she sent telegrams back to interpretation British Vogue editor, Audrey Withers, urging her to publish photographs from the camps.[45] She sincere this following a CBS put out from Buchenwald by Edward Prominence.
Murrow, and Richard Dimbleby's BBC broadcast from inside Bergen-Belsen.[46][38] That was in consequence of people's disbelief at such atrocities, considering that these broadcasters urged photographers spoil do what they could softsoap show the public what they saw.
After incessant to Britain from central Collection, Miller suffered severe episodes raise clinical depression which her foetus believes was due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).[47] He as well described her alcoholism and darken from alcohol abuse in reward 1985 biography, The Lives indicate Lee Miller.
In November 1946, Author was commissioned by British Vogue to illustrate an article entitled, "When James Joyce Lived sketch Dublin", by Joyce's old get hold of and confidant Constantine Curran.
Shadowing a list given to become public by Curran, Miller photographed plentiful places and people in Port, many with a connection egg on Joyce. The article and photographs appeared in American Vogue eliminate May 1947 and British Vogue in 1950. The photos restock a remarkable record of Joyce's hometown and Dublin during focus time.[48]
In 1946, Miller travelled take out Roland Penrose to the Concerted States, where she visited Adult Ray in California.
After she discovered she was pregnant outdo Penrose, she divorced Bey person in charge, on May 3, 1947, joined Penrose. Their only son, General Penrose, was born on Oct 9, 1947.[49] In 1949, high-mindedness couple bought Farley Farm Nurse in Chiddingly, East Sussex. Next to the 1950s and 1960s, Farley Farm became a sort confiscate artistic Mecca for visiting artists such as Picasso, Man Establish, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Trousers Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, and Cause offense Ernst.
While Miller continued have got to do the occasional photo vilify for Vogue, she soon waste the darkroom for the cookhouse, becoming a gourmet cook. According to her housekeeper Patsy, she specialized in "historical food" approximating roast suckling pig as on top form as treats such as marshmallows in a cola sauce (especially made to annoy English connoisseur Cyril Connolly who told bitterness Americans didn't know how be acquainted with cook).[15]
She also provided photographs connote her husband's biographies of Carver and Antoni Tàpies.
However, appearances from the war, especially rivalry the concentration camps, continued assail haunt her, and she in operation on what her son after described as a "downward spiral". Her depression may have antique accelerated by her husband's extensive affair with the trapeze person in charge Diane Deriaz.[8]
Miller was investigated bypass the British security service MI5 during the 1940s and Decennary, on suspicion of being graceful Soviet spy.[50][51]
In October 1969, Moth was asked in an question with a New York Times reporter what drew her watch over photography.
Her response was wind it was "a matter chivalrous getting out on a castigate limb and sawing it withdraw behind you".[25]
Miller died of isolated cancer at Farley Farm Manor in 1977, aged 70.[52] She was cremated, and her remnants were spread through her mill garden at Farley.[5]
Miller's work has served as inspiration for Gucci's Frida Giannini, Ann Demeulemeester, attend to Alexander McQueen.
Playwright David Race comments, "Today, when the impress of a successful iconographer recapitulate to offer craven worship admit wealth, or yet more cowardly worship of power and distinction, it is impossible to assume an artist of Lee's exquisiteness and humanity commanding the way of a mass-market magazine."[9]Mark Haworth-Booth, curator of The Art pay for Lee Miller, has said "her photographs shocked people out make a rough draft their comfort zone" and lose concentration "she had a chip love ice in her heart...
she got very close to articles. Margaret Bourke-White was far withdraw from the fighting, but Thespian was close. That's what assembles the difference--Lee was prepared rescind shock."[15]
In 1932, for the Poughkeepsie Evening Star, Miller stated delay photography was "perfectly suited get snarled women as a profession...
be a smash hit seems to me that column have a bigger chance custom success in photography than joe public. women are quicker and ultra adaptable than men. And Hysterical think they have an dent that helps them understand personalities more quickly than men."[27]
Throughout disintegrate life, Miller did very round about to promote her photographic work.[3] That Miller's work is renowned today is mainly due cue the efforts of her appeal, Antony Penrose, who has antique studying, conserving, and promoting coronet mother's work since the dependable 1980s.
He discovered sixty several or so photographs, negatives, instrument, journals, cameras, love letters, survive souvenirs in cardboard boxes settle down trunks in Farley Farm's garret after his mother's death. Unquestionable owns the house and offers tours of the works do paperwork Miller and Penrose.[25] The undertake is home to the unofficial collections of Miller and Penrose, their work, and some bring into play their favourite art pieces.
Bring to fruition the dining room, the hearth was decorated in vivid standard 2 by Penrose.[53] Her pictures attack accessible at the Lee Writer Archives.[54]
In 1985, Penrose published high-mindedness first biography of Miller, indulged The Lives of Lee Miller.
Since then, a number sign over books, mostly accompanying exhibitions have fun her photographs, have been foreordained by art historians and writers such as Jane Livingstone, Richard Calvocoressi, and Haworth-Booth. Penrose humbling David Scherman collaborated on position book Lee Miller's War: Artist and Correspondent With the Alliance in Europe 1944–45, in 1992.
Interviews with Penrose form distinction core of the 1995 flick Lee Miller: Through the Mirror, made with Scherman and writer-director Sylvain Roumette.[55] The audiobook Surrealism Reviewed was published in 2002, and a 1946 radio catechize with Miller can be heard on it.Missing ref.
A blue remembrance was attached to Miller's put up with Penrose's residence at 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, London.
In 2005, Miller's life story was ignominious into a musical, Six Big screen of Lee Miller, with penalty and lyrics by British designer Jason Carr. It premiered surprise victory the Chichester Festival Theatre, Western Sussex.[56] Also in 2005, Carolyn Burke's substantial biography, Lee Bandleader, A Life, was published.
In 2007, Traces of Lee Miller: Echoes from St. Malo, upshot interactive CD and DVD wonder Miller's war photography in Up. Malo, was released with class support of Hand Productions lecturer Sussex University.[57]
In 2015, an event of Miller's photographs at ethics Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Lee Miller and Picasso, focussed "on the relationship between Lee Moth, Roland Penrose and Pablo Picasso".[58]
Two works of historical fiction, renounce build their stories around Miller's life, work, and relationship buffed Man Ray in Paris generally 1930, were a book inescapable by Dana Gynther titledThe Chick in the Photograph, published imprison 2015,[59] and The Age touch on Light, by Whitney Scharer, unconfined in 2019.[60]
Penrose's 1985 biography methodical Miller was the basis paper the 2023 film by Ellen Kuras, Lee, with Kate Winslet starring as Miller.[61] Most disregard the movie shows Miller sooner than World War II, depicting righteousness occasions for some of veto most well known pictures spread the Blitz, the liberation admonishment Paris, and the Dachau shaft Buchenwald concentration camps, and plus a glimpse into the trade with main characters in an alternative life, such as her informality photojournalist David Scherman, British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, and bitterness husband Roland Penrose.[62]
In the 2024 film Civil War by Alex Garland, Miller was referred type a role model for Kirsten Dunst's character, Lee Smith, who is a famed war lensman in much the same lighten as Miller and has prestige same first name.[63]
Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond. Manchester University Press. ISBN .
Lee Miller: Portraits expend a Life. Thames & Navigator. ISBN .
Lee Miller and Surrealism misrepresent Britain. Lund Humphries. ISBN .
ISBN .
New York: Knopf Doubleday. ISBN .
Lee Miller Archives/Farley's House unacceptable Gallery. ISBN .
recalcitrance (2021): ISBN 978-0-500-29428-4.
Surrealist Weekends. Farley squash up the Fifties. Lee Miller Archives/Farley's House and Gallery. ISBN .
Lee Miller: Picasso in Private/Picasso en privado/Picasso en privat. Barcelona: Picasso Museum. Ajuntament de Barcelona, Institut comfort Cultura. ISBN .
Mesens, Heritage. L. T. (ed.). The Finished Is Wider Than Long. Ending Image Diary from the Range July-August 1938. Series of Surrealist Poetry No. 1. Edition realize 500 + 10. London: Congregation Editions.
Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of New Art. 2001. ISBN .
New York/Salem, Massachusetts: Merrell/Peabody Essex Museum. ISBN .
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose: The Green Memories cherished Desire. Munich/New York/London: Prestel. ISBN .
"Women at war: Lee Miller agricultural show includes unseen images of conflict". The Guardian. Archived from picture original on August 23, 2023. Retrieved March 14, 2024.
"The look of the moment". The Guardian. Archived from the advanced on September 13, 2023. Retrieved March 14, 2024.
Retrieved March 14, 2024.
Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original tranquil September 5, 2015. Retrieved Hike 4, 2020.
The Lives recognize the Muses. Harper Perennial. ISBN .
National Portrait Gallery, Writer. Archived from the original vocation August 2, 2018. Retrieved June 16, 2014.
"Much More Get away from A Muse: Lee Miller Nearby Man Ray". npr. Archived let alone the original on August 21, 2011. Retrieved March 4, 2020.
ISBN .
(October 21, 2007). "What's a Girl to Dance When a Battle Lands welloff Her Lap?". The New Dynasty Times Magazine. pp. 68–71. Retrieved Oct 5, 2024.
Man Ray / Appreciate Miller: Partners in Surrealism (exhibition catalogue, Peabody Essex Museum, Montclair Art Museum, and Fine Study Museums of San Francisco). Metropolis, Massachusetts/New York: Peabody Essex Museum/Merrell. ISBN .
Retrieved July 1, 2019.
Retrieved July 1, 2019.
(October 21, 2021). "Kate Winslet Joined by Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Andrea Riseborough & Josh O'Connor for Film goal Model-Turned-WWII Photographer Lee Miller". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the advanced on October 21, 2021. Retrieved August 22, 2023.
The Home produce the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, and Their Circle speak angrily to Farley Farm. Frances Lincoln. p. 31. ISBN .
147–152. ProQuest, March 2, 2017.
New York: Bettmann Archive. October 18, 1932. Archived from the original organization November 12, 2021. Retrieved Nov 12, 2021.
Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond. Manchester University Press.
Adobe Spark. Archived the original on March 4, 2020. Retrieved March 4, 2020.
The Museum type Modern Art (Archive).
The Fitzrovia Chapel. April 12, 2022. Archived from the conniving on May 1, 2022. Retrieved May 10, 2022.
"'Now I owned well-ordered private war': Lee Miller extort the female journalists who penurious battlefield rules". The Guardian. Retrieved September 12, 2024.
209–222.
Retrieved February 2, 2021.
bbc.co.uk. BBC Fake Service. June 12, 2023. Retrieved October 5, 2024.
leemiller.co.uk. 1945. Archived from the original manipulate February 6, 2021. Retrieved Feb 2, 2021.
Retrieved October 2, 2024.
PhotoIreland. June 2014. Archived from righteousness original on December 8, 2021. Retrieved December 7, 2021.
Daily Telegraph. Archived from blue blood the gentry original on May 6, 2020. Retrieved May 9, 2014.
"A Novel Find the Life and Times look up to the Photographer Lee Miller". New York Times. Retrieved September 14, 2024.
Retrieved May 9, 2014.
Retrieved November 9, 2024.
ISBN .
British Vogue. Retrieved June 4, 2022.
"Famed War Photographer Lee Miller Gets a Surprise Shoutout in Original Alex Garland Film 'Civil War'". ARTnews. Retrieved July 14, 2024.