Lee Miller is back in the spotlight thanks to a biopic released this week that stars Kate Winslet as the Vogue model turned war photographer. The film Lee focuses on Miller’s action-packed life in the late 1930s and 1940s and features events from a lively picnic with Man Ray, poet Paul Éluard and other friends in Cannes in 1937, to her harrowing discoveries at Buchenwald and Dachau at the camps’ liberation, in 1945.
As one of the first models to become a photographer at a time when there were few female snappers and even fewer female war ones, Miller was a pioneer. But she also shot fashion, land and streetscapes, had a library of Surrealist images and is known for works such as the women in black fire masks, the rolling Egyptian desert seen through mosquito netting and sitting in Hitler’s bathtub in his Munich home. “Her versatilty was unusual, and her images show an understanding of humanity on very different levels,” says photographer Jillian Edelstein.
“Her photography always brings that element of surprise in many different ways,” says Hilary Floe, senior curator of modern and contemporary British art at the Tate, who is curating a Lee Miller exhibition at the Tate Britain opening next year. “Consider her early Surrealist photograph that captures a web of soft tar oozing across the pavement towards a pair of anonymous feet, it provokes a sense of unease,” she says. “The tar could be mistaken for rushing water or an encroaching creature from the deep sea.”
Jewish Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray (born Miklós Mandl) was the earliest influence, shooting her as a model in 1920s New York. As one of the most important fashion photographers of the time, who also shot the great and the good, he added kudos to her nascent reputation, says Edelstein.
Furthermore, “you always learn from being photographed,” says Edelstein, who has 121 portraits in the National Portrait Gallery collection. A shoot “is always a performance and always a collaboration,” she says, so “she would have been fully involved whether it was helping with the lighting or fixing her make up or suggesting the way her hand should be,” she says.
Later Muray also gave Miller practical help by passing on jobs to her, when she set up her studio in New York in the mid-1930s and work was slow.
Muray “saved her skin”, says her son Antony Penrose whose biography, The Lives of Lee Miller, published by Thames & Hudson, formed the basis of the film. “Many of her European fashion contacts withered as the effects of the Depression increased and most of the promised contracts of work were not honoured,” he says.
Then there was Jewish Surrealist artist Man Ray aka Emmanuel Radnitzky, whom Miller sought in Paris in 1929 to teach her his experimental technique such as how to take fashion shots and portraits, how to retouch photographs or enlarge them. She would use them throughout her career.
And of course, Man Ray introduced her to Surrealism – the art, the ideas and the people like Dora Maar (born Henriette Theodora Markovitch), which “broadened her out,” and remained with her, says Penrose.
Take her Surrealist portrait of Jewish artist Saul Steinberg fighting with a garden hose at her Sussex home, Farleys House in 1953. While a light-hearted shot of him working in her garden, “the hose forms a graphic line reminiscent of Steinberg’s calligraphic illustration”, says Floe.
Even when Miller left Man Ray in 1932, their association paid off. “Because she had the, kind of, cachet of having worked in Paris and with Man Ray,” says Penrose.
Indeed, the first person to exhibit her photograph was Jewish art dealer Julien Levy in his avant-garde gallery along Madison Avenue in New York, in 1932, who also sold Man Ray’s work. He hung her work alongside established names such as Jewish Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, making her collectible, says Edelstein.
“If you are connected, and this person knows you, it makes a big difference. Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s often how it works,” says Edelstein. As “the art world…is risk averse,” because of the money involved, she says.
But for Miller, perhaps Levy’s most significant role was introducing her to the artist and poet Roland Penrose (played by Alexander Skarsgård in the film) at a Surrealist costume ball in Paris in 1937. Penrose and Miller became lovers the next day and married ten years later. (Penrose later co-founded London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1946).
Even Miller’s war-time buddy, photographer David E. Scherman was Jewish. They met when he was posted to London in 1941 for Life magazine.
Scherman, played by the Jewish actor Andy Samberg in the film, “helped her assimilate into the world of photojournalism”, says Penrose, as she became Vogue’s war correspondent, reporting in France and Germany after D-Day in 1944 as well as Paris’s liberation.
“She was lucky that she had him there as both probably keeping one another’s morale up,” says Edelstein, who has also shot in conflict zones in South Africa, Bosnia and elsewhere. For “there is imminent danger, where you don’t know what’s coming round the corner, you never know how you are going to react and you don’t know who’s going to respond, how, where, what …what you are thinking is that I want to get this information recorded so that I can deliver it”, she says.
As for her legacy, this is also defined by another Jewish connection, Vogue’s war-time art director Alex Kroll, as he chose what was considered the best of her war imagery and “that is what we go back to”, says Edelstein.
