Lee Miller was a model, a photographer, a socialite, a lover and a photojournalist. Above all else, she was a free-spirited, restless wanderer who was forever seeking to recreate the world around her so that it would suit her current inclinations rather than adjust herself so that she fit into whatever world she currently found herself to be in.
Photographed in the nude as a child and a teenager by her father, she became a model in New York in the late 1920s, then moved to Paris to live with and learn from a celebrated photographer of the day. Her work then was strongly influenced by the surrealist movement of the time. She later married a rich Arab from Cairo who, when she grew restless, bought her a plane ticket to go back to Paris where she fell in love with another man with whom she at one time lived in a menage-a-trois with another woman.
During World War II, she joined the U. S. armed forces and travelled through France to Germany, seeing the devastation of a battle up close in St. Malo, the horrors of a concentration camp at Dachau and then Hitler's apartment in Munich, where she had her first bath in months, and posed for quite an iconic photo in doing so.
After the war she retired to the English countryside, had a baby, became a raging alcoholic and later became well known for both her cooking and her dinner parties.
When she died in 1977 at the age of 70, she'd lived more lives in one than would make up those of many more of us mortals, whose experiences are so bleakly limited in comparison with hers.
A fascinating biography; very well done, and fittingly mostly in black and white.
Photographed in the nude as a child and a teenager by her father, she became a model in New York in the late 1920s, then moved to Paris to live with and learn from a celebrated photographer of the day. Her work then was strongly influenced by the surrealist movement of the time. She later married a rich Arab from Cairo who, when she grew restless, bought her a plane ticket to go back to Paris where she fell in love with another man with whom she at one time lived in a menage-a-trois with another woman.
During World War II, she joined the U. S. armed forces and travelled through France to Germany, seeing the devastation of a battle up close in St. Malo, the horrors of a concentration camp at Dachau and then Hitler's apartment in Munich, where she had her first bath in months, and posed for quite an iconic photo in doing so.
After the war she retired to the English countryside, had a baby, became a raging alcoholic and later became well known for both her cooking and her dinner parties.
When she died in 1977 at the age of 70, she'd lived more lives in one than would make up those of many more of us mortals, whose experiences are so bleakly limited in comparison with hers.
A fascinating biography; very well done, and fittingly mostly in black and white.
