Lee Miller: Photographs
For some, Lee Miller may be recognized only as the woman bathing in Hitler’s bathtub in his Munich residence after the allies had liberated the city, her combat boots sitting on the floor and her military fatigues piled in a chair next to the tub.
But, this famous shot by her friend and fellow war photographer David Scherman – taken as a photographic middle-finger to the Nazis as their Reich was collapsing – risks reducing one of the 20th century’s most fascinating, creative and courageous photographers to a mere meme.
Lee Miller: Photographs chronicles a photographer whose work spanned multiple decades and genres, yet had an unfailing commitment to quality and creativity throughout it all.
Published to coincide with movie, Lee
This book was published to coincide with the 2023 film, Lee, staring Kate Winslet. The film is available on Prime and Hula and well worth watching. It features a thoughtful foreword by Winslet and an introduction by Antony Penrose, Miller’s son who was born shortly after World War II. There is also a series of notes on the photographs that help add context. But, for the most part the book is sparing in its text and lets the photographs do the talking.
One of the fun things about the movie Lee is how cleverly it weaves Miller’s photographs into the context of the film, using them to punctuate key moments in the narrative without being overt about it. If you watch the film, you will see Kate Winslet as Miller posing a group of women searchlight operators during the Blitz, then on plates 43 and 44 are photos of the actual searchlight operators.
There is Winslet wandering the grounds of a field hospital in Normandy, poking her head and camera into the tents, capturing nurses resting between shifts, surgeons glowering at her intrusion and a badly burned soldier wrapped in bandages and, on plates 58, 59 and 60 we see the photographs the real Miller took.
You don’t need the movie to enjoy the book and don’t need the book to enjoy the movie, but each will spark your interest in the other.
Father introduced her to photography
Miller’s introduction to photography came early. Her father was an enthusiastic, if not overly talented, amateur photographer who introduced Lee to the hobby, including darkroom work. Her father’s interests included figure studies and he drafted a teen-aged Lee as a model at times. While the thought of a father making nude photos of his daughter surely makes us queasy today (to say the least) we can’t know how Miller felt about the photographs.
Whether it was because of, or in spite of, that experience, Miller appears to have been comfortable posing in front of the camera and photographing others behind the camera, whether dressed or undressed.
In an amazing coincidence, one day as she crossed a New York street a man grabbed her as she stepped into the path of a car heading towards her. The man was Conde Nast, the owner of Vogue magazine. Lee’s fashion modeling career had begun.
She became a favorite of Edward Steichen and began soaking up as much knowledge as she could.
Moved to Paris, Worked with Man Ray
Declaring “I would rather take a picture than be one,” she moved on from a modeling career that had stalled and went to Paris where she began a collaboration with Man Ray. That surrealist influence would remain even as she moved to fashion and photojournalism.
World changing events have a way of smashing into peoples’ lives and forever changing the arc of their careers. There are some, like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, who soldier on pursuing a consistent vision even as the world crashes around them. Others are like Dorothea Lange, who discovered that the commercial portraits that earned her a living could not compete with the urgency of documenting a disintegrating world in the midst of the Great Depression.
During the Blitz
When World War II broke out Lee was newly arrived in London. She had had an amicable split with her husband, an Egyptian businessman and felt the call of England. Capitalizing on her fashion experience, she began working for Vogue as a freelancer.
Her assignments combined fashion with the realities of London under siege, posing models among the wreckage and contrasting tailored fashions with fire masks, scrap paper drives, and military helmets, boots and maps – her eye now focused on a world where old the surrealist constructions seem to have sprung to life in the upside-down reality of a world at war.
Photographing the Nazi Hell
When the allies invaded Europe, Miller managed to find her way across the channel and began the odyssey that would eventually take her into the collapsing heart of the Nazi regime. Together she and Scherman joined the troops that were liberating Buchenwald and Dachau. It would be more than enough for most anyone to simply have seen the faces of those who survived and the bodies and bones of those who didn’t, but together Miller and Scherman, true to their obligations are journalists, not simply saw, but photographed the victims.
By the time they reached Munich and found Hitler’s apartment under allied occupation, one can only imagine the vindication and triumph they must have felt as they took turns washing off the dirt and stench of the battlefield in the bathtub of the man who had unleashed such horrors on the world.
Archives Discovered in the Family Attic
After the guns went silent Miller documented postwar Europe in the immediate aftermath. She returned to England, where she gave birth to her son Antony in 194X. She continued to photograph but mostly for the biographies that her husband, Roland Penrose wrote about Picasso, Man Ray, Joan Miro and Antoni Tapies. A photograph of Antony appeared in The Family of Man, the renowned exhibit put together by her old friend and mentor Edward Steichen.
Antony grew up knowing little about his mother’s career until, after Miller’s death, Penrose’s late wife Suzanna discovered a trove of thousands of negatives, prints and manuscripts in the attic of the family home. Penrose established the Lee Miller Archives to preserve and promote the work of his mother. Were it not for that discovery and his dedication to preserving the archive and memory of his mother’s work, it is entirely possible that the photographs by a remarkable photographer would have been all but forgotten.
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