Cover of the biography, 'Lives of Lee Miller', by her son Antony Penrose (photowings.org/Google Image search)
Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller was born on the 23rd of April 1907 in New York. Her father was an engineer and an amateur photographer, and had trained her to use the camera from an early age. This cultivated her interest in being both the photographer, and the subject of photography. (John Simkin, Biography of Lee Miller, Spartacus Educational) Miller first entered the world of photography as a model to the great 'Big Apple' photographers of the day, such as Edward Steichen, Hoyningen-Huene and Arnold Genthe.
In 1929, Miller went to Paris to work with the well known surrealist and photographer Man Ray, and ultimately established her own photography studio. She became known as a portraitist and fashion photographer, but her most enduring body of work is that of her surrealist images. She returned home to New York in 1932. Once again, Miller set up her own studio. It ran for two years and was hugely successful. Miller closed the studio when she married a wealthy Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, and went to live with him in Cairo. While in Egypt, she developed a fascination with long range desert travel, and photographed desert villages and ruins. During another visit to Paris in 1937 she met Roland Penrose, the surrealist who was to become her second husband, and travelled with him to both Greece and Romania. She left Egypt for London in 1939, shortly before the break out of World War II. She moved in with Penrose, and defying orders from the US Embassy to return to America, took a job as a freelance photographer for Vogue Magazine. (Artists/leemiller.co.uk)
In 1944, Miller became a correspondent to the US Army, and teamed up with Time Life photographer David E. Scherman, which began her association with wartime photography. She followed the US troops overseas. Miller is known to be - probably - the only female combat photo-journalist to cover frontline warfare in Europe, and among her many exploits she witnessed the siege of St Malo, the Liberation of Paris, the fighting in Luxembourg and Alsace, the Russian/American link up at Torgau, and the liberation of both Buchenwald and Dachau. She billeted in both Hitler and Eva Braun's houses in Munich, and photographed Die Führer's house, 'Wachenfeld' at Berchtesgaden, whilst it was engulfed in flames on the eve of the German surrender. Penetrating deep into Eastern Europe, she covered harrowing scenes of children dying in Vienna, peasant life in post-war Hungary, and finally the execution of Hungarian Prime Minister, László Bárdossy. (Artists/LeeMiller.co.uk)
After the war she continued to contribute to Vogue for a further 2 years, predominantly covering fashion and celebrity lifestyle. In 1947, she married Roland Penrose, and contributed to his biographies of numerous artists, including Picasso. Some of her portraits of world-renowned artists are viewed as the most powerful portraits of said individuals ever produced. However, she is arguably best remembered for the humorous surrealist images which pervade throughout her work.
She died of cancer in East Sussex, England, in 1977. (Artists/LeeMiller.co.uk)
Work: World War II Images
Though her surrealist and witty works tend to eclipse the more hard-hitting, somber wartime photography that Lee Miller took between 1944 and 1945, her work in Buchenwald in particular could easily be regarded as some of the most chilling and disturbing photography ever seen. Many of the photographs taken by Miller during World War II are untitled, and she personally left very little descriptions or backgrounds to the callous wartime imagery, leaving the nature of the photographs in question to describe the situations they portrayed. And, quite conspicuously, they do.
Miller photographed Buchenwald, a German Nazi concentration camp established near Weimar in 1937, as soon as the region was freed of Nazi occupation by American troops in 1945. The camp itself left telling evidence of the obscenity and cruelty of it's Nazi guards, with mountains of decaying corpses piled high, unidentified, forgotten, victims of being born as Jews. Miller photographed the dead prisoners in numerous ways, capturing the vacant expressions of their faces in brave and daring close-ups, along with the reactions of the American troops and surviving prisoners as they stood over dead prisoners - or to some, compatriots and friends.
(leemiller.co.uk/Picture Library)
This photograph from Buchenwald depicts the brutality of the Nazi guards who oversaw the concentration camp before the Liberation of Buchenwald by US troops. The abundantly clear lack of food and nutrition has left the prisoners drained, dehydrated and frighteningly thin. Bones protrude to the surface of their skin, with almost no muscle of body fat left to sustain human life. May of these prisoners may simply have starved to death, though the blood on one deceased man's face would suggest an element of torture played a part in his inhumanely-brought upon departure from life. The proximity of the camera to the victims of this repugnant abuse paints a chilling display of humanistic suffering, which to many who did not witness the atrocities of war first hand, may have just been described to them in words via news media.
Another untitled picture from Buchenwald depicts the emotions evoked within the US soldiers and surviving prisoners as they stand solemnly over another pile of distorted, decaying bodies. The indignation of the prisoners' deaths is obvious, with at least three of the deceased totally undressed. Again, it shows the horrifying realities of the treatment these Jewish prisoners of war received in German captivity. The animalistic nature of the disposal of the bodies is haunting, and captured perfectly within the image.
(leemiller.co.uk/Picture Library)
A similarly sickening but powerful image displays one deceased individual in an angle that makes it look like he is peering into Miller's camera, almost in search of solace or hope. He of course is not, but I believe this particular photograph was taken to instill such an impression on the viewer.
These three images and many more are available at leemiller.co.uk, the 'official' website containing over 3,000 of Miller's images from throughout her career. Many of the photographs displayed on the website are unavailable anywhere else in the world, with the exception of various Miller exhibitions which tour art and photography galleries across the globe.
My Personal Opinion of the Photographer
When I was assigned Lee Miller for this assignment and did a quick 'Google Image' search of her work, I was apprehensive that I would not only dislike the photographs, but ultimately find it difficult to write 1,500 words on the artist herself and her work. What transpired was quite the contrary. I found the depth of Miller's photography - the aesthetically beautiful, the witty and surreal, the hard-hitting and quite sickening - truly remarkable. Where many photographers tend to focus on one aspect of society or life and photograph it in various ways throughout their careers, Miller chose instead to diversify entirely the niches in the industry within which she worked. She was, it seems, a true pioneer of her field.
(leemiller.co.uk/Picture Library)
Take for example, this photograph, 'Eileen Agar with "The Golden Tooth"' from 1937. The contrast in this photograph from Miller's later work during World War II is extreme, to the point where one may not recognise that both are works of the same person. The almost satirical nature of Agar lovingly clutching an inanimate object of historical value is worlds apart from the horrendous suffering captured in Buchenwald some years later, showing that as Miller evolved as a woman, so too did her work. The relentless weight of a war-torn world saw her try to create images that would evoke empathy and horror rather than a chuckle or a smile. This picture, taken on its own merits, is an enjoyable one which undoubtedly spread happiness to many who saw it. The diversity in her photography was extreme, yet the quality never seemed to suffer.
For me, a large part of photography is the aim to evoke emotion in a person from within an image. It struck me that Lee Miller succeeded in doing so regardless of the genre of image she produced. The emotions I felt personally while browsing through her work ranged from a deep-lying, almost satisfying happiness to genuine, spine-tingling horror. But, crucially, all the photographs seemed to mean something to her. It was as if - despite much of her work being completed 60-90 years ago - you, the viewer, shared the emotion that Miller herself felt while taking the photograph. The smile she must have worn while capturing Eileen Agar's intimate moment with a statue. The palpable horror in witnessing the results of a massacre of an ethnic minority. I smiled. I shivered. It was a roller-coaster of emotive expression.
The idea of not using titles or written descriptions for many of her photographs, particularly from the war, also truly intrigued me. It means, I presume, that when one looks at such an image by Miller, it is entirely at the discretion of the viewer what they see within or take from the image. It again centres on the notion of diversity in her photography; while she took the picture to capture something in a way which she herself saw it, she doesn't force-feed her own vision on anybody who looks at her photography. She leaves open the idea that there may even be more going on within the boundaries of the image than she initially anticipated. Something she failed to see, you might see, or vice versa.
Overall, I enjoyed her work. The range of emotions and reactions that the pictures provoked was far broader and more extreme than I expected. Lee Miller's talent in telling a story within just one image, or making me wonder what the story was within another, was extraordinary and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about her and her vast portfolio of photographs.
