Unfortunately, women’s contributions to photography are neglected or ignored in the annals of history. Ask any photography aficionado to name five influential female photographers who have transformed the medium; they will mostly fail. Hence, many women photographers, such as Anna Atkins, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gerda Taro, and Vivian Maier, have achieved distinction later in life. Like these stalwarts, a luminary, too, gained much recognition after her demise: Lee Miller.
The lead image is a screenshot from ‘Lee’s trailer. The image is for representation purposes. The film appears in theaters on September 27th.
This article will be a bite-size history lesson if you haven’t heard this name. Miller, a model-turned-photographer, contributed exceptionally to war photography during World War II. Her works are so crucial that Sky Cinema produced a film about her, inspired by her life. Titled Lee, Kate Winslet portrays the fearless photographer who seized the most paramount photographs of the war. The movie, to be released in September, takes notes from The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose, her son. Penrose found his mother’s archives following her death and soon made it his life’s work to establish The Lee Miller Archives. While the film will not be entirely biographical, it features “the most significant decade of Lee Miller’s life,” from 1938 to 1948.
“I would rather take a photograph than be one.”
Lee Miller
But Miller’s life, before that, was equally captivating. Born in 1907 in New York, Miller was always around cameras. Her early modeling career started when she modeled for her father, an amateur stereoscopic photographer. However, this chapter of her life was contentious, as the pictures were often captured in the nude until her adolescence. Her son, Penrose—born to her second husband, Roland Penrose, a historian and champion of the surrealist movement—called it “a transgression of a relationship.” It was in 1917, after surviving sexual assault, that she began photography. Many historians and biographers believe that the trauma left an eternal impression on her life, along with the ache of heart-wrenching scenes she witnessed during the war.
“[Being a great photojournalist is] a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.”
Lee Miller
The year was 1927, when publisher Condé Montrose Nast offered her a modeling contract for Vogue, leading her to photographer Edward Steichen. Miller’s biographer, Carolyn Burke, noted that it was he who suggested that if she was serious about pursuing photography, then she must learn from the best: Man Ray. However, in an interview, Miller stated that her idea was to study under man Ray. Either way, her term with the significant contributors of Dada and surrealist movements developed her vision that would later evolve into an integral voice in the war. But more so, her contribution also led to the re-discovery of the Sabatier effect, which Ray called solarisation.
By the mid-1930s, after leaving Ray and starting her photo studio in Paris, Miller married Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian businessman. Her time in Cairo honed her surrealist aesthetics, but Miller realized that the sand dunes and the high society were not her calling. It was 1937 when Miller visited Paris, where she would meet her second us after Penrose. Two years later, when Britain entered the war, Miller, who had married Pensrose, commenced her journey as a photojournalist for the British Vogue and published several photo essays. “Lee was seizing the opportunity. So war was opportunity,” said fashion editor Marion Hume in Capturing Lee Miller, a documentary.
“I took some pictures of the place [Hitler’s residence] and I also got a good night’s sleep in Hitler’s bed. I even washed the dirt of Dachau in his tub.”
Lee Miller
Her success there eventually led her to become an official U.S. Army war correspondent, which opened more windows of opportunity. For instance, she was operating alongside American photojournalist David E. Scherman, a staffer for Life magazine. Her first assignment—about the U.S. Army nurses working in Britain— was visually stunning, highlighting women’s contribution during the chaos of war. Some of the noteworthy occurrences she documented included the battle of St. Malo, the Blitz, the disarray following D-Day, the emancipation of Paris, the Battle of Alsace, and the U.S. military’s entry into Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Notably, she was one of the few U.S. Army women photographers present during combat.
Miller’s work is outstanding, not only because the photographs had aesthetics and rules of thirds but because they could evoke sentiments and nudge spectators to think. Moreover, audiences read the images in countless ways, depending on the perspective they wish to employ to comprehend them. “Lee’s Surrealist eye was always present. Unexpectedly, among the reportage, the mud, the bullets, we find photographs where the unreality of war assumes an almost lyrical beauty,” Penrose wrote. “On reflection I realize that the only meaningful training of a war correspondent is to first be a Surrealist—then nothing in life is too unusual.”
“No question that German civilians knew what went on. Railway into Dachau camp runs past villa, with trains of dead or semi-dead deportees. I usually don’t take pictures of horrors. But don’t think that every town and every area isn’t rich with them. I hope Vogue will feel it can publish these pictures.”
Lee Miller
Toward the end—when her friends wanted to showcase her photo series—Miller desired nothing more than to forget the horrors of humanity. It was after her demise from terminal cancer that her son, in 1977, found her archives of more than 80,000 negatives. We don’t know what would have happened if he had not gone to the attic that day. Maybe we would have lost some historical gems along the way.