- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- Jane Livingstone
Lee Miller, photographer
Model, photographer, friend of the Surrealists, war correspondent: the unique Lee Miller had an extremely varied career. Now we can rediscover her magnificent photographic oeuvre.
In the 1920s, Lee Miller, a successful model, travelled to Paris to work behind the camera, something that was increasingly arousing her interest. Introduced by Steichen, she visited the Surrealist photographer Man Ray, whose student she became. Together, they developed the technique of solarisation, and Lee Miller went into business for herself as a photographer. She was the first to take her models out of the studio and photograph them on the streets in New York in the early 1930s.
Her marriage to Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934 took her to the island of Gezira, near Cairo (Egypt), where she took up the habit of frequently travelling – a habit she never abandoned – as she took a step forward in her career with landscape photography.
She returned to Paris and worked as an accredited correspondent for Vogue magazine during the war. She was the only photographer present at the invasion of Saint-Malo and the first photojournalist to report on the horrors of Dachau. After the war, Lee Miller married the Surrealist painter and writer Roland Penrose and moved to England. She gradually gave up commercial work, but continued to photograph friends who came to visit: Picasso, Miró, Noguchi, Max Ernst and Braque, among others.
