Lee Miller - American Wartime Photographer
Elizabeth
‘Lee’ Miller, Lady Penrose was an American photographer from New York, she was
originally a fashion model during the 1920s but moved to Paris where she
changed her career to becoming a fashion and fine art photographer. Elizabeth
was married to Aziz Eloui Bey, a wealthy Egyptian man whom she met whilst
photographing Eloui’s first wife Nimet. After her marriage to Aziz, Lee moved
to Cairo. Miller and Aziz divorced in 1947, and her second husband, Sir Roland
Penrose was an English artist, historian and poet and during WWII used his
artistic skills to teach camouflage.
Lee was a war correspondent during the Second World War for Vogue and covered events including the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris and concentration camps Buchenwald and Dachau. Miller was part of the surrealist movement, which had developed post-WWI and depicted unnerving scenes that expressed themselves. She also photographed nurses, but also French women who were found to be guilty of Nazi collaboration, these photographs can be found here:
Photograph one
Photograph two
Photograph three
Photograph four
At the outbreak of WWII, Miller was living in London with Penrose, she teamed up with David E. Scherman who was a correspondent for Life on a selection of assignments. The ‘famous’ photograph of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub can be viewed here: She was photographed by David E. Scherman in 1945.
Other versions of this image can be seen here:
Foggy Version
These
images are surreal when you first look at them, but when you understand the
context they mean a lot more. Here Lee is pictured in Adolf Hitler’s apartment
in his bathtub, which is shocking in its own right. However, the boots pictured
on the map have dirt on them from Dachau and the dirt being smudged into the
bathmat depicts almost a ‘two-fingers up’ to Hitler, and rightly so.
I recently visited Berlin and the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, or the Jewish Museum Berlin and they had a reference to Lee Miller in a presentation which can be seen below:
Lee and Penrose had a son called Anthony, born in 1947. They bought Farley Farm House and had a few famous friends visit them, most notably Pablo Picasso. Unfortunately, Miller suffered from PTSD from her visits around Europe and elsewhere, and especially the concentration camps ‘haunted’ her. Photography became less of a priority for her, and she became a gourmet cook in 1977. Lee Miller died of cancer, at the age of 70 but her legacy still lives on.
I recommend having a flick through Lee's work which can be found here, the Archive has a wide range of photographs but they are definitely worth looking at.
Sources:
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