CWho among us hasn’t dreamed of an adventurous life, full of stimulating encounters, full of twists and turns? How many of us would have liked to cross the ocean to experience a new existence? Lee Miller has done it several times, the Atlantic has never been an obstacle. His life still resonates today as a model of emancipation and non-conformism that radiates from art to relationships.
Lee Miller has crossed the century with the grace of beauty and the strength of determination. Free and independent, courageous and aware, her figure transcends fashion, art and photography.
It is no coincidence that Kate Winslet, the magnificent English actress who loves complex women characters, produced and starred in the biopic Lee Miller in 2023.
The Thousand Lives of Lee Miller
In 1907 he was born in Poughkeepsie, a town an hour from New York. She began her modeling career early: her father, an engineer with a passion for photography, always portrayed her, dressed or naked, with a passionate artistic vocation that he probably passed on to his daughter: Lee in fact studied fine arts. She has confused desires, but she knows that the province is too small for her.
Lee is Lee, we will soon discover that he stops at nothing. He moves to New York. It is the first of a series of countless turning points. In 1926, he is 19 years old. While the fascist dictatorship asserts itself in Italy, New York explodes with vitality and glamour, the city is in turmoil, jazz is going crazy and skyscrapers are rising; the wind of the Great Depression that will overwhelm America in the years immediately following is not yet blowing.
Lee Miller models, in Mirande dress with crochet gloves and hat. (Photo by George Hoyningen-Huene/Condé Nast via Getty Images)
Nothing happens by chance, or maybe it does
One morning, on Fifth Avenue, she risks being hit by a car. It doesn’t happen. Instead, the event that will change his life occurs: to avoid the impact, Lee falls into the arms of a passerby. He is not just any man, but Mr. Condé Nast, the man who invented Vogue and who chose her to embody the female model of the moment. With the cover of American Vogue, success is assured: Lee is the new woman. He poses for the great masters of photography Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz, learns, grasps the secrets of the technique, observes the magic of light. Everything happens fast, her life as a successful model could last a long time. Instead, after a couple of years, here is the second turning point: Lee moves to Paris.
Life-changing encounters
With a letter of introduction in his pocket, he introduces himself to Man Ray, already a famous photographer and now an artist among the surrealists. A partnership is born that explores art and ignites love. It’s the dream of dreams. Lee and Man experience a magical moment: their friends are Paul Éluard and Jean Cocteau, just to name two. Attention, don’t let yourself go, the dream is short. Lee has accustomed us to the turning points, but now it seems incomprehensible: after only three years, in 1932, he abandons Man Ray, the master who had become possessive, in a sea of pain and returns to New York. That great genius Man Ray could not handle the American’s independence and desire for autonomy, it seems he had suffocated her with scenes of jealousy. In the Big Apple, he opens his studio and she subsequently marries an Egyptian businessman twenty years more mature.
It seems like it was true love. I lived for art, I lived for love, we could also attribute Puccini’s famous aria to Lee, but the photographer’s fate was not as ungrateful as that of Tosca. Lee is unstoppable, he moves to Egypt, travels and photographs. Who knows if it’s the African landscapes or married life that make her impatient again, before long she leaves the country for a new trip to Europe.
He rejoins the group of surrealists, finds old friends and meets new ones, including Picasso who photographs and by whom he has his portrait taken. In one of the Parisian stops he meets another man who will be fundamental and forever, he is the artist and collector Roland Penrose. We who believe in love forever can begin to hope. A new marriage and another city, this time it’s London. Roland is an artist, cultured, handsome and rich. We sigh with happiness. Lee can take photographs, travel, she is a young woman of 32 years old, but war breaks out to destroy everyone’s dreams.
Picasso and Lee Miller in the painter’s studio, Liberation of Paris, Rue des Grands-Augustins, Paris, France, 1944
The war that transforms everything
He could continue to work for the Condé Nast magazine, as he has started doing again since being in England; Instead,joins the Allied troops as a photojournalist by joining the London War Correspondents Corp. Photographs the war. He photographs and writes. Since 1942 he has been an official correspondent for Vogue.
Following the American troops, he meets David Sherman, a Life correspondent. Their partnership, not only professional, gives life to a memorable image: after the fall of Munich, the two reporters, photographing the wounded city, arrive in a building at number 16 Prinzregentenplatz. Here is the command of the 179th regiment of the 45th US Army Corps, but on the second floor is Hitler’s apartment. Lee doesn’t resist, the front has tried her, but she hasn’t forgotten the comfortable life and the pleasure of a hot bath. He turns on the water in the tub and, to his amazement, discovers that it is hot. In an instant he undresses, dives, David takes the photo, the amphibians are on display while the uniform is folded on a stool. A portrait of the tyrant is placed on the edge of the tub, an unlikely statuette of a marble goddess completes the scenography. Lee is immersed in the Führer’s tub, washes away memories, images of dead and wounded. In the most impure place, seek purity. Then Lee will also photograph David in the same circumstance.
Portrait of Lee Miller during World War II, England, 1944 (Photo by David E Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)
An icon or an anti-icon, it depends on how you look at it. Irreverent, audacious, blasphemous. It is their spoils of war, their revenge against the despot. To learn about the amazing life of the indomitable Lee, it’s worth reading The Führer’s bathtubthe novel by Serena Dandini (Einaudi 2022). The war and its demons will leave deep scars on the photographer. Depression and PTSD, the acronym used to define post-traumatic disorder, are the consequences of the tragedy of war and above all of the horror of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps where the reporter, with her photographs, bears witness to the tragedy of the Holocaust. When he sent the rolls of film with images of the concentration camps to Vogue, he accompanied them with a telegram: “Believe me, it’s all true.”
What he saw and photographed the first American to enter the concentration camps it indelibly engraved her soul and mind. She will never heal from that wound, despite her return to a comfortable life in the Sussex home, Farley Farm House, which her husband Roland Penrose set up with great care. After the war, she will travel again for work, but above all she will receive many friends, many artists: Picasso, Henri Moore, Max Ernst and her old lover and mentor Man Ray, just to name a few.
English art and radio critic Frederick Laws (left) and American photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977) at a one-night-only performance of Pablo Picasso’s play “Desire Taken by the Tail” at the Rudolf Steiner Hall, London, March 1950. The production was presented by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) alongside William Blake’s “An Island in the Moon.” Original publication: Picture Post – 4988 – Pablo Picasso Playwright – Desire Taken by the Tail – pub. March 4, 1950 (Photo by Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Here we are, once again imagining his life full of excellent conviviality and lovely conversations. In these years, in the house of the surrealists, as Farley Farm House is called, he discovered a passion for cooking, a lifeline that calms the ghosts of the days and the nightmares of the nights.
In ’47 she gave birth to her only son, Anthonyscrupulous and passionate exegete of all his work.
Lee Miller’s parable
A century ago, the artists’ muse and Vogue model taught us the ephemeral good of beauty. She took her life into her own hands and did what she wanted with it, abandoning a career, as easy as it was slender, that relied on her attractiveness. In a relatively short time Lee Miller has managed to be an eclectic artist, experimenter, portraitist, landscape painter, fashion and war photographer. Modern, never predictable, free from stereotypes, capable of facing pain, with her gaze she showed us that beauty and horror must be observed with the same lucid intensity.
Lee Miller for the 10 years of Camera – Italian Center for Photography
Walter Guadagnini signs the great retrospective on Lee Miller and passes the baton of the prestigious Turin institution to François Hébel. We asked the outgoing director to tell us about the figure of this fascinating pioneer.
«Lee Miller tells the worst of humanity». With these clear words with an inexorable tone, Walter Guadagnini speaks of the American photographer to whom Camera, the photography center that he has directed to date, dedicates a large retrospective.
Who is Lee Miller?
«For me he is an incredible character, he goes through any situation and always comes up with images that add something to what you are seeing».
In what sense?
«If you think about war photography she shifts the vision a little, she also does it with fashion and portraiture. Find his figure, it returns an image you don’t expect. Lee changes genre, he dares where the others remain within their scope. The fashion photos amidst the ruins of war, the opera singer among the rubble, my favourite, are disturbing.”
Has your role as an author been recognised?
«Looking at the career he has had, the recognition he has had is relative. Yes, of course, she publishes in magazines, participates in exhibitions, but she paid the price of being Man Ray’s companion. And she probably paid for the fact that she was so restless: as soon as she reaches a certain stability, she leaves and starts again on the other side of the world.”
And in the world of fashion?
«In that sector she probably had more recognition, but if we think that for British Vogue, during the war, she started working for free, perhaps not, she wasn’t recognized enough there either».
Is solarization, a fascinating darkroom procedure with which features are highlighted, an invention of Lee’s?
«We don’t know who invented what: Lee says it was her, Man Ray says it was him. Certainly, the solarization process was a case of ingenious result. The disputes between the two concerned more sentimental issues than artistic ones.”
What did you discover about Miller with this exhibition?
«She was an extraordinarily intelligent woman, only such a brilliant person could have managed to identify and bind to herself a community of artists who made the twentieth century».
The exhibitions
Lee Miller. Works 1930-1955
In Turin until 1 February 2026
Info: https://camera.to/mostre/lee-miller-opere-1930-1955/
Lee Miller
In London until 15 February 2026
Info: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/lee-miller