From Vogue cover girl to front-line war photographer: Lee Miller
Condé Nast pulled a 19-year-old Lee Miller back from an oncoming car, and months later she was on the cover of Vogue. She then crossed to the other side of the lens, shaping Surrealist photography with Man Ray and, in 1944, shooting a battle she was never supposed to enter.
Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on April 23, 1907. Her father, an amateur photographer, used her as a model and taught her the technical side of the craft. After studying stagecraft in Paris and life drawing at the Art Students League, she became one of New York's most wanted models, photographed by Edward Steichen and others; a George Lepape drawing of her in a blue hat and pearls fronted Vogue on March 15, 1927.
In 1929 she went to Paris to learn from Man Ray, who claimed not to take students. She became his collaborator, lover and muse, and some of her pictures ended up credited to him. Together they revived solarisation, a partial reversal of tones; in one of her accounts a mouse ran over her foot and she flicked on the darkroom light mid-development. Critic Mark Haworth-Booth called the effect a perfect Surrealist medium, positive and negative at once. Jean Cocteau turned her into a plaster statue for The Blood of a Poet.
Back in New York in 1932 she opened her own studio, and Julien Levy gave her the only solo show of her life in 1933. A marriage to the Egyptian engineer Aziz Eloui Bey took her to Cairo, where a desert photograph near Siwa inspired Magritte's 1938 painting Le Baiser. In Paris she met the British Surrealist Roland Penrose, and when the Blitz began she was living with him in Hampstead.
Turning down pleas to go home, she became Vogue's war photographer and, refused by the British Army, won US Army accreditation in December 1942. Sent to a supposedly liberated Saint-Malo, she stayed five days under fire, recording the first known use of napalm, and was put under house arrest for it. With Life correspondent David E. Scherman she covered the liberation of Paris and the camps, cabling her editor to believe her. Her son later linked her post-war depression to trauma. She died on July 21, 1977.
Source: Lee Miller
