Lee Miller

The face, and the darkroom behind it

Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller was born on 23 April 1907 in Poughkeepsie, in New York State, into a household where the camera was already domestic equipment: her father Theodore, an engineer and keen amateur photographer, installed a darkroom at the family's Cedar Hill Farm in 1912 and photographed his daughter throughout her childhood. In 1927 she became a professional model, appearing on the cover of American Vogue — the New York fashion monthly — as a drawing by the French illustrator Georges Lepape.

The modelling career ended in an early lesson about who controls an image. In 1928 a fashion photograph of her by Edward Steichen, the most celebrated American fashion photographer of the day, was used, without her expecting it, in advertisements for Kotex sanitary products — an unheard-of context for a society face, and enough of a humiliation to push her towards the other side of the lens. She sailed for France.

Montparnasse, 1929–1932

In 1929 Miller moved to Paris and became Man Ray's student, model and partner — three roles the Lee Miller Archives names in that order, and the order matters: she is usually remembered as his model and his lover, which has buried the fact that she went to him to be trained, and was. Man Ray was then the presiding photographer of Montparnasse, the Left Bank quarter where the foreign artists of Paris lived, and his studio was where fashion work, portrait commissions and Surrealist experiment all happened in the same rooms.

Their best-known technique came out of an accident of hers. Working in the darkroom, Miller re-discovered the Sabatier effect — light striking a print or negative mid-development, so that tones reverse and a dark line rims every figure — and Man Ray named the result solarisation. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London states it plainly as joint work: 'Together, they discovered the "solarisation" photographic technique, in which the image recorded is wholly or partially reversed in tone.' Both used it for the rest of their careers.

In 1930 she asserted her independence and opened her own studio at 12 rue Victor Considerant, near the Denfert-Rochereau end of Montparnasse — the square on the southern edge of the quarter, in the 14th arrondissement. From September that year her photographs ran in French Vogue and her first self-portrait appeared in American Vogue; she took a part-time job photographing operations for a Paris surgeon; and she acted in The Blood of a Poet, the first film by the poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau, playing the armless classical statue that comes to life and sends the poet through a mirror. It was her only film role. In 1932 she closed the Paris studio, left for New York, opened Lee Miller Studios Inc. at 8 East 48th Street, and showed her work at the Julien Levy Gallery, the New York room that introduced Surrealist photography to America; Levy himself had bought her prints on a visit to Man Ray's studio the year before.

Cairo, London, and the way back to Paris

In 1934 she married the Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and moved to Cairo, where the pictures she took in the desert — the shadow of a broken wall, a wire-mesh screen over infinite sand — are among the strongest Surrealist photographs of the period, though she never presented them under that label. Bored with expatriate society, she came back to Paris in 1937 to see friends and, at a Surrealist fancy-dress party, met the British painter, collector and writer Roland Penrose, whom she later married. She was living in London when the Blitz began — the German bombing campaign against British cities that ran from September 1940 into the following spring.

The war, and the return to Paris in uniform

In December 1942, encouraged by the Life magazine photographer David E. Scherman, Miller was accredited to the United States armed forces as an official war correspondent — one of very few women who covered the European front line. Her employer was Vogue: the magazine that had put her on its cover as a model in 1927 now printed her photographs of field hospitals, ruined towns and dead soldiers.

From July 1944 she was in Europe. She came under fire at St Malo, the walled Breton port, as it was taken from the German garrison; she photographed the Liberation of Paris in August and then the liberation of Luxembourg; she covered the Battle of the Bulge, the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes that winter; and she was a central figure in getting French Vogue back into print after four years of German occupation had stopped it. Paris in August 1944 was, for her, both a war story and a homecoming to a city she had worked in as a young woman.

In 1945 she was among the first journalists to enter Dachau, the concentration camp outside Munich, and photographed what she found there. In Munich itself she and Scherman went into Adolf Hitler's requisitioned apartment, and Scherman — in the V&A's words — 'helped her capture the now iconic picture of Miller bathing in Hitler's bathtub'. The photograph is often reproduced as a joke and is not one: it is a staged image, made by two correspondents who had just come from the camps, of an American woman washing in the private bathroom of a man who had killed millions and who, that same week, killed himself in Berlin.

Farleys, and the attic

In 1949 Miller and Penrose bought Farleys House in East Sussex, and she largely stopped photographing. She drank; she suffered long depressions; and she became, in the words her own Archives use, a gourmet cook — a competitive, inventive one, feeding a farmhouse full of artist friends. She spoke very little about the war. She died at Farleys on 21 July 1977.

Her son Antony Penrose knew his mother as the cook and not the correspondent. After her death he and his wife found the other life in the attic: tens of thousands of negatives, prints, manuscripts and dispatches, the whole record of the Paris studio and the war, boxed and unmentioned. He published The Lives of Lee Miller in 1985, and the Lee Miller Archives at Farleys have been putting the work back into circulation ever since. The V&A marked her centenary in 2007 with the exhibition The Art of Lee Miller and took six prints into its permanent photography collection.