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Lee Miller Biography & Facts

Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), was an American photographer and photojournalist. Miller was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, becoming a fashion and fine art photographer there. During World War II, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Her reputation as an artist in her own right is due mostly to the fact her son discovered and promoted her work as a fashion and war photographer. Early life Miller was born on April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her parents were Theodore and Florence Miller (née MacDonald). Her father was of German descent, and her mother was of Scottish and Irish descent. She had a younger brother named Erik, and her older brother was the aviator Johnny Miller. Theodore always favored Lee, and often used her as a model for his amateur photography. When she was seven years old, Lee was raped while staying with a family friend in Brooklyn and was infected with gonorrhea. In her childhood, Miller experienced issues in her formal education, being expelled from almost every school she attended while living in the Poughkeepsie area. In 1925, at 18, Miller moved to Paris where she studied lighting, costume, and design at the Ladislas Medgyes' School of Stagecraft. She returned to New York in 1926 and joined an experimental drama programme at Vassar College, taught by Hallie Flanagan, a pioneer of "experimental theatre". Soon after, Miller left home at 19 to enroll in the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan to study life drawing and painting. Career Modelling Miller's father introduced her and her brothers to photography at an early age. She was his model – he took many stereoscopic photographs of his nude teenage daughter – and showed her technical aspects of the art. At 19 she nearly stepped in front of a car on a Manhattan street but was prevented by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue. This incident helped launch her modeling career; she appeared in a blue hat and pearls in a drawing by George Lepape on the cover of Vogue on March 15, 1927. Miller's look was what Vogue's then editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase was looking for to represent the emerging idea of the "modern girl". For the next two years, Miller was one of the most sought-after models in New York, photographed by leading fashion photographers, including Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, Nickolas Muray, and George Hoyningen-Huene. Kotex used a photograph of Miller by Steichen to advertise their menstrual pads without her consent, effectively ending her career as a fashion model. She was hired by a fashion designer in 1929 to make drawings of fashion details in Renaissance paintings but, in time, grew tired of this and found photography more efficient. Photography In 1929, Miller traveled to Paris intending to apprentice with the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Although, at first, he insisted that he did not take students, Miller soon became his model and collaborator (announcing to him, "I'm your new student"), as well as his lover and muse. While in Paris, she began her own photographic studio, often taking over Man Ray's fashion assignments to enable him to concentrate on his painting. They collaborated so closely in this period that some photographs taken by Miller are credited to Man Ray. Together with Man Ray, she rediscovered the photographic technique of solarisation through an accident variously described; one of Miller's accounts involved a mouse running over her foot, causing her to switch on the light in mid-development. The couple made the technique a distinctive visual signature, examples being Man Ray's solarised portrait of Miller taken in Paris circa 1930, and Miller's portraits of fellow surrealist Meret Oppenheim (1930), Miller's friend Dorothy Hill (1933), and the silent film star Lilian Harvey (1933). Solarisation fits the surrealist principle of the unconscious accident being integral to art and evokes the style's appeal to the irrational or paradoxical in combining opposites of positive and negative. Mark Haworth-Booth describes solarisation as "a perfect surrealist medium in which positive and negative occur simultaneously, as if in a dream". Among Miller's friends were Duchess Solange d'Ayen–the fashion editor of French Vogue magazine, Pablo Picasso and fellow surrealists Paul Éluard and Jean Cocteau. Cocteau was so mesmerized by Miller's beauty that he transformed her into a plaster cast of a classical statue for his film, The Blood of a Poet (1930). During a dispute with Man Ray regarding the attribution of their co-produced work, Man Ray is said to have slashed an image of Miller's neck with a razor. After leaving Man Ray and Paris in 1932, she returned to New York City. She established a portrait and commercial photography studio (with $10,000 worth of backing from Christian Holmes II and Cliff Smith) with her brother Erik (who had worked for the fashion photographer Toni von Horn) as her darkroom assistant. Miller rented two apartments in a building one block from Radio City Music Hall. One of the apartments became her home, while the other became the Lee Miller Studio. Clients of the Lee Miller Studio included BBDO, Henry Sell, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, Saks Fifth Avenue, I. Magnin and Co., and Jay Thorpe. During 1932 Miller was included in the Modern European Photography exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York and the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition International Photographers with László Moholy-Nagy, Cecil Beaton, Margaret Bourke-White, Tina Modotti, Charles Sheeler, Man Ray, and Edward Weston. In response to the exhibition, Katherine Grant Sterne wrote a review in Parnassus in March 1932, noting that Miller "has retained more of her American character in the Paris milieu. The very beautiful Bird Cages at Brooklyn; the study of a pink-nailed hand embedded in curly blond hair which is included in both the Brooklyn and the Julien Levy show; and the brilliant print of a white statue against a black drop, illumine the fact rather than distort it." In 1933, Julien Levy gave Miller the only solo exhibition of her life. Among her portrait clients were the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, actresses Lilian Harvey and Gertrude Lawrence, and the African-American cast of the Virgil Thomson–Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934). In 1934, Miller abandoned her studio to marry the Egyptian businessman and engineer Aziz Eloui Bey, who had come to New York City to buy equipment for the Egyptian National Railways. Although she did not work as a professional photographer during this period, the photographs she took while living in Egypt with Eloui, including Portrait of Space, are regarded as some of her most striking surrealist images. In Cairo, Miller took a photograph of the desert near Siwa that Magritte saw and us.... Discover the Lee Miller popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Lee Miller books.