Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose, (April 23, 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, USA; † July 21, 1977 in Chiddingly, East Sussex, England) was a U.S. model, photographer, and photojournalist. As a war photographer, Miller provided pictorial documentation of the London Blitz and the Allied invasion through the end of World War II, and documented the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps: Her works are counted among the important photographic works of the 20th century.
Life:
Elizabeth Miller was born to Theodore and Florence Miller in Poughkeepsie in 1907. Her father introduced her to the artistic and technical aspects of photography at a very early age by taking her portraits. She suffered a traumatic childhood experience when she was abused as a 7-year-old. She was infected with gonorrhea in the process. In 1926, she enrolled in the New York Art Students League to study stage design and lighting. That same year, she escaped a car accident in Manhattan in which she nearly walked in front of an approaching vehicle. At the last moment she was pulled back by a passerby, who thus saved her life. It happened to be the publisher Condè Nast, which published Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. Nast was fascinated by Miller's striking appearance and her elegant clothes - she also spoke French - and so he spontaneously offered her a contract as a model. At school, she was a maladjusted student. Lee Miller, despite her much-admired girlish beauty, was a cool-headed and determined woman, known for quick decisions and surprising about-turns in her life. She once wrote of herself, "For some reason I always prefer to go somewhere else."
Modeling career:
Beginning in 1927, Lee Miller first worked in the U.S. as a model for Vogue with renowned photographers such as Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene. In 1929, she traveled to Paris to join the progressive art scene - especially the Surrealists - to join. She met the painter, filmmaker and photographer Man Ray, with whom she worked for some time and was also briefly involved. With Man Ray, a number of joint photographic projects emerged: for example, they both experimented with the possibilities of solarization. Together they produced the portfolio Electricité (1931), with Miller as a model, for the Paris Electricity Company CPDE.
Photographer:
After parting ways with Man Ray, Miller decided to work independently as a photographer with her own studio in France. Initially she worked as a portrait and fashion photographer; her passion for metaphysical-surreal subjects and stylistic elements, however, remained unbroken. Disappointed by love affairs, as well as by the drifting-apart art scene in Paris, she returned to New York in 1932 and soon opened her own photography studio again. She worked very successfully as a photographer in the metropolis for two years until she met the wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, whom she married in 1934. Around 1935, she moved with him to Cairo. There she took some of her "most impressive" photographs, (slip) largely inspired by Surrealism. Impressed by the barren desert landscape and the abandoned pharaonic sites, she photographed the ruins and temples. She climbed the Pyramid of Cheops in Giza with her complete camera equipment to capture it in the picture. Her marriage to Aziz Eloui Bey did not last long either. In 1937, on a trip to Paris, Miller met surrealist artist Roland Penrose, who had divorced his wife Valentine that year. He would later become her second husband. The two traversed half of Europe together, and again produced photographic works. They met Pablo Picasso, who created six portraits of Miller. In 1939, Miller left Egypt for good, moving to London with Penrose just before the outbreak of World War II. Penrose was called up, and Miller briefly returned to New York as a photographer for the American edition of Vogue magazine.
War Photographer:
In 1944, Lee Miller was accredited by the U.S. Army as a military correspondent and worked closely with Time-Life photographer David E. Scherman, who was her partner for a short time. Miller was one of the few women assigned as war correspondents. With Scherman, she photographed wartime activities in Europe. At the Battle of Saint-Malo, she captured one of the first uses of napalm in the picture. She documented the liberation of Paris. She developed the films in an improvised darkroom in her hotel room. Other photo documentaries included the U.S. Army's encounter with Soviet troops in Torgau and the capture of Adolf Hitler's Berghof on the Obersalzberg in Berchtesgaden. A very famous photograph by Scherman shows Lee Miller in a posed photo in Hitler's bathtub in his private Munich apartment at Prinzregentenplatz 16 after the capture of Munich on April 30, 1945. Miller's coverage of the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps documented the misery of the inmates and the horror of mass murder. These traumatic experiences left lasting traces in the photographer's psyche. Miller was one of the first to publish images of destroyed West Germany, thereby changing perceptions of the time. Immediately after the surrender. Her compassion for the victims of Nazi rule, such as forced laborers and concentration camp inmates, contrasted sharply with her contempt for the defeated Germans.
Later years:
After the war ended, she retired from active photojournalism and married surrealist artist Roland Penrose on May 3, 1947. The couple moved into a cottage in rural England. On September 9 of that year, their son Antony was born. In 1949, the family moved to Farley Farm House in Chiddingly. In the 1950s Miller still occasionally freelanced for various magazines such as Vogue and Life, but after the birth of her son she neglected her work and - presumably as a result of the experiences she had not come to terms with - increasingly suffered from shell shock, developed depression and began to drink excessively.
Lee Miller died of cancer on July 21, 1977, at her estate, Farley Farm House in East Sussex. Her ashes were scattered over the farm's herb garden.
Farley Farm House:
The estate of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, Farley Farm House, surrounded by a sculpture garden designed by Penrose, is now a museum with rooms, such as the kitchen and studios, partially unaltered. In addition to archives, it contains the couple's art collection. In addition to their own works, there is, for example, a collection of works by artist friends such as Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Joan Miró. Antony Penrose, the founder of the museum, also attached a gallery that shows local and emerging artists in its rooms.
Work:
That Lee Miller's work is still known today and published in illustrated books is thanks to her son Antony Penrose, who has managed her estate since the early 1980s. Antony once said of his mother that she had lived many different lives, much of which remained mysterious to himself because she was adept at compartmentalizing herself - even from her own family - to protect herself. He described this in the essay The Enigma of Lee Miller. Miller's troubled life became apparent to his son only after his mother's death. From the numerous found letters, documents and photographs of her estate, Antony Penrose, together with contemporary witnesses, tried to sketch a coherent biography. Much about Lee Miller's person, however, remains unknown due to material lost during wartime.
"image trouvée":
For his mother's Surrealist photographs, Antony Penrose introduces the term image trouvée in his essay, as a "counterpoint" to the objet trouvé of the Surrealists, such as Man Ray: "She has detached the images from their context and endowed them with a meaning that goes beyond their original message.
Went beyond." Penrose even questions how many photographs can really be attributed to Man Ray, who preferred to leave many works to his assistant in order to devote himself to painting. This "mutual influence" is difficult to distinguish, Penrose says.
"Lee Miller's War:
Lee Miller's major work includes photojournalistic coverage of the end of World War II for Life and Vogue magazines, most of which was published posthumously under the title Lee Miller's War in 1992 by Antony Penrose, with a foreword by David E. Scherman. The vivid, but in some passages strangely unbiased photo reportage begins with the preparations for the Allied invasion of Normandy, reports on the liberation of Saint-Malo and Paris in 1944, and shows the remaining artists from Miller's circle of acquaintances with a visit to Pablo Picasso's Paris studio and the portraits of Paul and Nusch Éluard, Cocteau or Colette. Makeshift fashion photographs in wintry Paris 1944/1945 and features of actors such as Maurice Chevalier or Marlene Dietrich as well as Fred Astaire attending to troops convey the reawakening of the art and cultural scene and at the same time imply the "American way of life" of a "normal" post-war everyday life. The pictorial reportage continues through the Ardennes in January 1945, showing the destroyed Alsace, the crossing of the Rhine, images of the bomb-damaged cities of Cologne, Ludwigshafen, and Frankfurt, and the meeting of the 69th Division of the 273rd U.S. Infantry Regiment with Soviet troops in Torgau on April 26, 1945. Lee Miller's war account concludes with the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. The pictorial documents reflect the suffering of the emaciated, ragged prisoners and show the obvious bewilderment of the overwhelmed, dumb-looking camp guards staring into the camera with bloodied faces. Some photographs show dead SS officers who had evaded responsibility by committing suicide. Miller's and Scherman's photographs give a sense of the full scale of the Holocaust through the piles of corpses shown and the human bones in the open crematorium ovens. The reportage ends with a photograph of the burning Berghof on Obersalzberg - titled by Lee Miller as "Eagle's Nest in Flames: the Burning Pyre of the Third Reich."
Lee Miller
