“If I had nine simultaneous lives, all indestructible, my enthusiasm and curiosity could never be satiated,” Lee Miller, the polymathic American photographer, war correspondent, actress, cook and model once said. And walking through a huge new retrospective of her work that just opened at Tate Britain in London, there is ample evidence of her relentless drive, innovation and courage.
She was speaking to the St. Petersburg Times in 1969, and in the interview, she described how she had “entered photography from the back end,” moving from modeling classic flapper looks in the 1920s to working on the other side of the lens in Paris, New York, London and Cairo.
Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1907, she died in England in 1977, and her biography reads like a wild heroine’s high-voltage journey through the avant-garde. Her extraordinary life, which spanned some of the 20th century’s most artistically compelling and politically harrowing moments, has often overshadowed her singular contribution to the art of photography.
Today, many people know the stories that Miller told about herself — a mix of swashbuckling drama and self-deprecation — better than they know her work.
Like the time in 1927 that she was saved from a traffic accident by the publishing magnate Condé Nast, who — struck by her beauty — immediately commissioned an illustration of her for the cover of American Vogue. Or the time she showed up in Paris and announced to the Surrealist artist Man Ray, “I’m your new student.”
Or, perhaps most famously, the time she “accidentally” discovered the photographic technique of solarization by turning on Man Ray’s darkroom light while some negatives were still being developed. The result, also known as the “Sabatier effect,” partly reverses an image’s black and white tones, lending a soft, silvery shine. Man Ray is often given credit for the technique, and for many images that he and Miller created together.
A room of the Tate Britain show is devoted to spotlighting their experiments and establishing Miller as a collaborator and a co-author. Many of the pictures are of her: “Neck (Lee Miller)” (1929) shows Miller in partial profile, her neck craned back and her short hair tucked behind her ear. Another, “Anatomies” (1930), looks as if it might be Miller again, but all we see is a neck inclined so far that the face has vanished, leaving only a taught swath of exposed flesh. (À la Surrealism, in which one thing often resembles another, it is also rather priapic.) This room of erotic images shows Man Ray and Miller as deeply bound, posing with and for each other, and the young woman as a deliberate actor rather than a passive object.
Miller soon outgrew Man Ray’s tutelage and developed her own distinctive style, capturing incongruous, everyday scenes with a keenly Surrealist bent. A pool of tar on a Paris sidewalk appears to creep and ooze toward the tidy black shoes of a man standing nearby. The looming branches of a row of pollarded tree reach up like gnarled hands and throw tangled shadows against a wall. A woman reaches her manicured hand into her tightly coiled hair so that her arm appears disjointed from her body, like an alien limb.
Another room is devoted to work she made in Egypt, where she lived from 1934-39 while married to the businessman Aziz Eloui Bey. These images are striking and spare, but with the same eye for strangeness: A tear in a window screen that looks out onto the desert appears like a portal into another universe; stacked cotton sacks, bursting at their seams, look like clouds that have fallen to Earth; a stone carving of Rameses II is captured in shadows at an angle that gives the pharaoh the look of a slumbering giant.
In the years that followed, Miller turned her unique eye to portraiture of friends and fellow artists like Joseph Cornell, Colette, Leonora Carrington and Charlie Chaplin. Some of these will be familiar to anyone who caught the impressive 2005 exhibition “Lee Miller: Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Newcomers will see how she transformed her sitters, as she did the streets around her, to make something new and often fantastical.
When World War II broke out and the Blitz hit London, she was working as a freelance photographer for British Vogue. She covered the women’s war effort across Britain, photographed fashion shoots in the ruins of the capital, and eventually traveled across Europe to photograph the war’s end and its aftermath. Some of her best-known photographs from this time include brutal images of suicided German officials, Nazi S.S. guards with bashed-in faces, train cars filled with corpses, and children on the brink of starvation.
This is where the Tate show ends. The last works are dated from 1946, yet Miller lived for three more decades before dying from cancer at 70. Her biographer, Carolyn Burke, told me that when she first met Miller, in Paris in 1970, “Lee did not talk about her work. I had the sense that, for whatever reason, she had moved on.”
Burke had met Miller by chance, rushing in late to a talk about Man Ray that Miller’s husband, Roland Penrose, was giving at the American Center in Paris. The last seat available, Burke said, was next to an older woman — who happened to be Miller. “I exclaimed, ‘You’re Lee Miller!’ and she said, ‘Yes I am,’ and invited me to the Café de Flore afterwards for a drink,” Burke recalled. At the cafe, they sat together at the side of the group, which was otherwise focused on Penrose.
Did Miller mind being overlooked, given her own prodigious output? Burke thought so, but also noted that at the end of the war, Miller was so badly undone by her wartime experience that she was ready for a break and a serious change. “As a woman, one should forge ahead and live as freely as possible,” Miller once wrote Burke in a letter, “but one can sometimes get in over one’s head.”
In 1949, Miller and Penrose bought Farleys Farm, a property in the English countryside about 50 miles south of London. While she continued to take photos and write lighthearted pieces for Vogue for a few years, the work didn’t come easy for her, according to Burke’s fascinating and comprehensive biography, “Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera,” and Penrose asked Miller’s editor, Audrey Withers, to stop the commissions. Miller was likely suffering from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, and had also developed an alcohol problem.
Today, Farleys Farm is multipronged private operation. Tours of the house, which are open to the public, take you through the downstairs rooms, with their views out into the surrounding green and walls covered with paintings by Penrose and other luminaries, including Alexander Calder, Dorothea Tanning and Pablo Picasso. (Picasso visited on several occasions and painted Miller six times; she took over 100 photographs of him.)
A cabinet in the living room holds Miller’s Hermes Baby typewriter and her medium format Rolleiflex camera, as well as two pairs of brass knuckles that she carried on assignment in postwar Europe. In a study off the garden is Miller’s desk, where she worked on a cookbook in the last months of her life. Never one to do things by halves, she had consulted over 2,000 recipe books in her research.
The house is also the nerve center for Miller’s archive, which contains over 60,000 images and documents that were discovered stashed away in the attic after the artist’s death. Many of these are now stored in an outbuilding on the property that has recently been refitted as a climate-controlled archive, and Miller’s granddaughter Ami Bouhassane recently gave me a tour. (The archive is not open to the public.)
The volume of Miller’s works and other objects was overwhelming. There were cabinets and cabinets of carefully stored prints and negatives. There was also Man Ray’s old suitcase, seemingly purloined from Marcel Duchamp, whose name has been written over on the label. And there were bags of Miller’s clothes, which were used to design the costumes that Kate Winslet wore in the 2023 biopic “Lee.”
Over lunch in the Farleys Farm cafe, which serves up some of Miller’s recipes, Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, told me about his childhood in the house. He grew up surrounded by art and culture, but later became a farmer, and now lives three fields away. Later, perhaps having inherited his mother’s eye, he took photographs for Farmers Weekly magazine and started a production company.
“I had no idea about her life outside of our home and being my often very frustrating mother,” Penrose said. When he discovered the cache of work after her death, he added, he “felt this immense sense of grief that she had a whole other existence I knew nothing about. And now it was too late.”
Since then, he has been working gain posthumous recognition for Miller’s vital work that was overlooked, or simply unseen. (There are still thousands of unprinted negatives in the archive.) In 1985, he published the biography “The Lives of Lee Miller,” a labor of love that contained revelations about his mother’s life that even her husband been unaware of.
When I asked Miller’s son how she would have felt about the show at Tate, he said she just would have wondered what was coming next. “For Lee, it was the traveling and not the arriving that was important,” he said.
Miller might have had nine lives, maybe even more, and we may never know everything she saw and experienced, or understand who she was — if that can be known that of anyone. Fortunately, we can turn to her pictures, which hold enough answers for more than a lifetime.
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