Lee Miller: A Life

Lee Miller: A Life (2005) is a biography of American photographer Elizabeth “Lee” Miller by biographer, art critic, and historian Carolyn Burke. Burke analyzes hundreds of primary and secondary sources, including letters and Miller’s own photography, to document Miller’s prolific artistic life in the context of her unusual childhood and resistance to social conformity in New York and Paris, the latter which she later called her true home. The biography was praised for the quality of its underlying research and ability to capture Miller’s passionate, wandering, and resilient artistic spirit.

Lee Miller was the second of three children born to Theodore and Florence Miller in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her parents’ occupations went against gender and marital norms at the time: Florence was a mechanical engineer, while Theodore was a photographer. These unorthodox aspirations might have been thwarted, especially for Florence, but for the progressive climate of New York at the time that gave them both this freedom. Theodore transmitted his love of photography to Lee. He often photographed portraits of her, introducing her to the technical aspects of photography. Unfortunately, Miller’s carefree youth was interrupted when she was sexually assaulted by a guest of her parents at the age of 7. Scholars of photography have argued that her later work is deeply informed by the trauma of this early experience.

As a teenager, Lee was known as a rebellious girl. She was thrown out of multiple prestigious schools in Poughkeepsie. She followed her love for lighting, acting, and set design, enrolling in L’Ecole Medgyes pour la Technique du Theatre. After this first stint in Paris, which lasted only seven months, she returned to New York and enrolled in the Experimental Theater at Vassar College. Around this time, she decided that theater was not the right artistic field for her: it lacked the immediate, tangible, and ephemeral qualities she enjoyed most in making art. She then went to the Art Students’ League in New York City, studying painting and drawing. She was offered a modeling job by Conde Nast after a random encounter on the street. This job gave her access to famous photographers, including Edward Steichen and Arnold Genthe. Steichen convinced her to try photography and connected her with Man Ray, a photographer in the surrealist genre in Paris.



Miller moved again to Paris and found Ray at a nightclub, where she announced that she was now his student. Ray accepted the confrontation, taking her under his wing. They fell in love and lived together for three years. Their collaboration led to the accidental invention of the photographic technique solarization, in which a developing photo is exposed to light, inverting its color scheme. She worked for Paris Vogue, as well as for several experimental film projects, including Jean Cocteau’s famous 1930 work The Blood of a Poet. Her burgeoning artistic personality was described as ruthless and unsentimental. Eventually, she left Ray and Paris for New York and married Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey.

In 1932, Miller opened a photography studio in New York, photographing celebrities with her brother Erik. She continued to model for Vogue for two years, then moved to Cairo with Bey. Her photography experienced a dramatic shift during this time, focusing on the architectural features of modern Egypt and its ruins. Finding that Bey’s careless life philosophy diminished her own horizons, Miller left him and moved to London with a Surrealist art collector, Robert Penrose. When World War II erupted, she became a war correspondent and photojournalist. In 1941, she photographed the Blitz, publishing her work in Vogue. She later called Vogue a “frivolous paper,” and left it to become a freelance photographer. Her photography after Vogue was very grim, surveying the despair of war. Miller was well-known and respected as a photographer of wartime Paris and the concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald. After the war ended, Miller suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She married Penrose in 1947, gave birth to a son, Anthony, and went back to celebrity portraiture, all while suffering from alcoholism and depression. Her last published work was in Vogue in 1953. She became mostly withdrawn from the art world, refusing to share her work until her death from cancer in 1977. Her son published much of his mother’s work posthumously, after finding prints and negatives in her attic in the 1980s. This late work is celebrated for its compelling representation of postwar effect.