Masdearte’s current item profiles Lee Miller’s sixteen-year photographic career, spanning surrealist experiments, travel photography, portraits, fashion and wartime documentation.
Miller began her photographic career in Paris in 1929, working often with Man Ray, who was her partner, and creating scenes that took motifs out of context through close framing and experimental techniques including solarization. Through these procedures, she sought to reveal a reality full of paradoxes and make those paradoxes visible to the viewer. Her travel photographs transformed landscapes into modernist and ambiguous forms, including ‘Portrait of Space’, a desert view that combines interior and exterior spaces on the same surface.
Miller later returned to England and collaborated with the British edition of Vogue; although she was initially hired as a fashion photographer, she soon began documenting the destruction caused by German air raids on London during the Blitz. A 1941 London photograph records model Elizabeth Cowell wearing a Digby Morton suit.
At David Scherman’s suggestion, Miller became an accredited war photographer in 1942 and one of only five women photojournalists employed by the United States in Europe. She travelled across the continent with American troops at the battlefront and, in 1943, began writing her own texts to accompany her photographic reports. The following year, she witnessed the Allied landing in Normandy and the Battle of Saint-Malo.
The special also discusses Miller’s collaboration with Man Ray, her work in Egypt and Europe, her role as a war photographer during the Second World War, and her photographs of the liberation of concentration camps and postwar Europe.
