LEE MILLER

Recently I had the privilege of travelling to London and while there I was fortunate to see the Lee Miller photography exhibit at the Tate Britain. You can learn more about the

Lee Miller, Model with Lightbulb

exhibition at this link: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/lee-miller. It travels to France and then ends the year in Chicago.

If you have the chance to see it, I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you can't get there, it is worth getting the catalogue. It is titled simply "Lee Miller" and is published by Yale Press.

Her story is endlessly fascinating. Miller was born in the United States in 1907 in New York state. She lived for a while in NYC and was a sought after fashion model. In 1929 she went to Paris specifically to work with Man Ray and successfully became his apprentice. Some photographs attributed to Ray were actually taken by Miller. And the "solarization" process was really discovered by her, though both Ray and Miller used it to great effect.

In 1932 she returned to the United States and worked as a successful photographer with a studio in NYC. She pursued fine art and fashion photography. She met and married an Egyptian businessman and moved to Egypt in 1934. In 1937 Miller returned to Paris where she met the British painter Roland Penrose. She was living with Penrose in the UK when WWII began.

All the while, of course, Miller was taking photographs. So there are stunning photographs of Egypt, of Paris and striking portraits of artists, many of whom are now household names.

With the advent of WWII Miller began a new phase of her career - photojournalism. She became, if you can believe it, Vogue magazine's war photographer. In that capacity she worked out a way to get to the front and was among the first people to see and to photograph the death camps. It was an experience from which she never fully recovered.

On the same day that Hitler committed suicide, Miller found herself staying in Hitler's Munich apartment. There is a photograph of her in the bathtub of the apartment, with her boots, encrusted with mud from her trip earlier that day to Dachau, on the bath mat.

Following the war Miller's relationship with Penrose continued and they were eventually married and had a son. She pursued photography for a while, but ultimately gave it up in favor of becoming a gourmet cook.

She died in 1977 and her ashes were spread through her herb garden at the house she shared with Penrose in Hampstead in England. You can see from this brief summary what an incredible life she led. And her photographs are among the best of the 20th Century.

Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub