Correspondences

The Many Photographic Lives of Lee Miller

Lee Miller, installation view, “Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945),” 2024, The Image Centre, Toronto. Photo: © Clifton Li. Courtesy The Image Centre, Toronto.

As someone who used to work in the education and public programming department of a small museum, I’m always intrigued by how the first of its audience—the docents—interpret an exhibition. Long-time volunteers often occupy these roles, training directly with the curator on the relevant exhibition themes and details to share with the museum’s publics. So, on a friend’s recommendation, I did a docent tour for The Image Centre’s “Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945).” The 2024 exhibition, which closed last December, considers the American photographer’s “most intense and productive” period, beginning with Miller running a New York City commercial portraiture studio and ending with her Second World War images for British Vogue. Organized in collaboration with the Lee Miller Archives, the exhibition coincided with the wide release of Lee, the 2023 Kate Winslet-starring biopic focusing on Miller’s wartime work. The layers of meanings that coalesced initially carried a waft of officially sanctioned hagiography. The exhibition and the film—not to mention any exhibitions organized around Miller’s work—involve the Lee Miller Archives, a small archive privately managed by her family. My experience with the docent tour reminded me that there are many complicated narratives about historical female artists, and those fault lines sometimes lie in the gossipy, tell-all details. Case in point: on an early December weekday amid a crowd of boomer attendees, we gathered outside the frosted plexiglass entrance of The Image Centre’s main exhibition space. We listened to the docent, a “stylish woman of a certain age,” introduce the show. Clutching tightly a copy of The Lives of Lee Miller (Thames & Hudson, London, 1985), the biography written by Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, the docent recounted the book’s revelations of a “dysfunctional, but wealthy” fashion model-turned-photographer. “My other tour will be about the people she slept with,” she quipped, which got some laughs from the crowd. It’s hard to decipher where that laughter came from, whether from a place of judgment or a shared sense of recognition for an early- to mid-20th-century American female artist living a transatlantic bohemian life, or, perhaps, discomfort. When I later relayed the anecdote to The Image Centre’s Curator, Exhibitions and Public Engagement, Gaëlle Morel, she expressed disappointment at the docent’s framing, a reflection of how Miller is usually spoken of. “It’s still complicated to just look at her as a photographer, first and foremost,” she said.

“Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932– 1945)” is an exacting presentation—call it even a corrective to the way the artist’s photographs have been overwhelmed by her larger-than-life biography. “Miller’s extensive posthumous exhibition history has in part depended on the construction of a marketable biographical version of the artist,” Patricia Allmer, a leading surrealism scholar, wrote in her 2016 monograph, Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (Manchester University Press, 2016).

Installation view, “Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945),” 2024, The Image Centre, Toronto. Photo: © Clifton Li.

Installation view, “Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945),” 2024, The Image Centre, Toronto. Photo: © Clifton Li.

Indeed, much of this “marketable biographical version” originates from Penrose’s 1985 biography, which laid the groundwork for an exhibition-making history initially focused on the famous men in her life. After modelling during the 1920s for photographers such as Edward Steichen in the pages of Vogue, Miller moved in 1929 from New York City to Paris to become a photographer. Steichen had encouraged her to apprentice with Man Ray, and Miller became his photographic assistant and eventually his lover. Their intense three-year relationship led to her becoming a frequent subject in Man Ray’s work. Together they had experimented with surrealist imagery and photographic techniques, like the accidental discovery of solarization. After a brief marriage to a wealthy Egyptian businessman, Miller was married to the British surrealist painter Roland Penrose, a co-founder of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), and the eventual author of authoritative biographies on their long-time artist friends, such as Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Joan Miró.

Antony Penrose published The Lives of Lee Miller and in the same year, by the same press, American art historian Whitney Chadwick’s book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement was published. This was an influential study of the female artists who were an essential part of surrealism, including, among others, Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo. At the time, the press favourably reviewed the biographies. Anthony Curtis, the Financial Times’s chief book critic, reviewed both titles together and ended his review with a visit to Farley House, the former Sussex home of Miller and Penrose that houses the Lee Miller Archives. But as Stephen Butler noted in his 1986 review of Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement for the Oxford Art Journal, Chadwick seemed fixated on the relationships her female artists had with male surrealists rather than their engagement with the artistic movement itself.

Installation view, “Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945),” 2024, The Image Centre, Toronto. Photo: © Clifton Li.

Installation view, “Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945),” 2024, The Image Centre, Toronto. Photo: © Clifton Li.

Further, in a 2021 podcast interview between Antony Penrose and his daughter, Ami Bouhassane, co-directors of the Lee Miller Archives, Penrose candidly discussed how the high costs of archival processing informed which of Miller’s photographs were initially circulated. “We prioritized by working on the images that were going to earn us a return,” he says, which included her photographs of famous artists like Picasso and Man Ray. One wonders how the Archives’ initial strategy, along with Chadwick’s reading, may have set an ongoing pattern in curatorial approaches to the work that seem caught up in understanding Miller through her romantic relationships. Exhibitions such as “The Surrealist and the Photographer: Roland Penrose and Lee Miller” at the Dean Gallery and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2001, and “Surrealist Muse: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and Man Ray” at the Getty Museum in 2003, indicated a tone. In Patricia Allmer’s view, it wasn’t just Miller’s proximity to her more famous male artist peers that was defining. It was also how her biography became material for literature revelling in her trauma and excesses, written first by Penrose and later expanded upon in Lee Miller: A Life (University of Chicago Press, 2007), the biography by Australian author Carolyn Burke. Allmer rightly noted how past journalistic accounts of Miller’s life consistently sensationalized her biography. Biography remains part of understanding Miller’s work, even showing its way in an exhibition’s label text. In a 2001 Washington Post feature surveying the trend of museums’ overreliance on wall label texts, American art critic Blake Gopnik singled out a touring exhibition of Lee Miller’s work for pairing great images with “simple-minded” labels. An example: a label accompanying a photograph of dead snails stated how “Lee, who had many secrets, saw that armour does not always offer enough defence in itself.” While the label lacks biographical content, Gopnik makes a point that every curator still likely contends with the issue of how descriptive labels have to be in providing context. This would arise when a Lee Miller photograph is operating as both historical artifact and aesthetic object and remains an ongoing concern in the posthumous exhibition-making around Miller’s work. In 2015, when London’s Imperial War Museum organized its exhibition “Lee Miller: A Woman’s War,” Lauren Richman observed in her 2016 Art Journal review that exhibition labels extensively detailing Miller’s childhood sexual abuse, as well as her father’s grooming, “set the tone of the exhibition and mark the point from which the conceptual framework—women’s experiences during the wartime—begins to fray.” The biographical points had become so rote that they detracted from the images.

We can therefore understand The Image Centre’s more narrow focus on Miller’s work and the lack of biographical detail. “Her gender had obviously a lot to do with what she could accomplish at the time,” explained curator Gaëlle Morel, who had previously curated a 2022 iteration of the exhibition for Les Rencontres d’Arles, the annual summer photography festival in Arles, France. “But she was an independent photographer who made a living and had a real career. So, let’s focus on that. Let’s focus on the work.”

Kids and guns around Notre Dame, 1944, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2025. All rights reserved, www. leemiller.co.uk.

The exhibition forgoes extended labels for thematic text panels adjacent to large murals of singular photographs representing its core sections: Miller’s early 1930s studio portraiture, her WW II-era wartime fashion photography and her work as a war correspondent. The first section focuses on Miller’s commercial studio in New York City, active from 1932 to 1934. It moves next to a blown-up, red-marked proof as a mural, the text panel summarizing Miller’s clientele of high-society figures, performers, fashion and cosmetics brands and theatre productions, but I found there was scant evidence of the kind of studio Miller ran and why she chose to shutter it. According to the text panel, she closed up shop soon after marrying an Egyptian businessman and settling in Cairo. But evidence found in the scholarship and journalistic record about Lee Miller adds more. Miller, in actuality, struggled with the business of running a studio. Despite the financial backing of two businessmen, it was the Great Depression, and Miller’s balancing portraiture of artists and avant-garde performers with commercial work for fashion and cosmetics brands was precarious. As well, Erik Miller, her younger brother and darkroom assistant, recalls his sister scheduling only one sitting per day because she was caught up in her social life of poker games and parties with theatre friends. Before she left New York for Cairo, Miller cabled Man Ray to ask if he would be inclined to take over the New York studio; she felt guilty about abandoning it and leaving her brother stranded for work. “Pull your own chestnuts out of the fire,” was his brusque response.

The Image Centre’s exhibition of Miller’s portraits of the cast of the 1933 all-Black opera, 4 Saints in 3 Acts, held my attention. One of the portraits was installed along with the vitrine display of a copy of the libretto, featuring Altonell Hines, the Commère in 4 Saints in 3 Acts. In this photograph Hines seems guarded, perhaps even defensive. Her participation in an opera that was identified as peak American modernism showed some contradictions, and Altonell Hines’s portrait reveals limitations of the photographic medium. She was starkly lit by Miller, and the tonalities seem muted, obscuring her blackness. When Miller’s portraits of two other cast members, Bruce Howard and Edward Matthews, were unveiled for the first time in a 2005 National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Antony Penrose explained Miller’s process. “She deliberately manipulated only a few portraits, but with these she put a red filter in front of the camera to make the singers’ skin appear less black, a trick she’d picked up,” he told the Guardian. Later, these portraits would be featured in “4 Saints in 3 Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-Garde,” a 2017 exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London that gave critical attention to the cast portraits and to stage and behind-the-scenes photographs taken by Miller as well as by Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes and Thérèse Bonney.

Wounded American soldier freed from the Citadel, 1944, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2025. All rights reserved, www.leemiller.co.uk.

Tired Nurse outside tent, 44th Evacuation Hospital, 1944, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2025. All rights reserved, www.leemiller.co.uk.

The inclusion of these works in “Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945)” was both intriguing and frustrating: potent for how they could recontextualize historical narratives, particularly this significant early 1930s encounter between the Harlem Renaissance and the American modernist avant-garde, but limited by the lack of didactic context. In the past decade, as attested by the work of the American transdisciplinary scholar Ruha Benjamin, there has been more consideration regarding the way technology could reflect and even reproduce racism. Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity Books, Cambridge/Oxford, 2019) addresses this in its considerations of the history of photography and racial taxonomies, and photography’s history “as a tool to capture visually and classify human difference.” Benjamin discusses the introduction and use of Kodak’s Shirley cards, which began in the mid-1950s when colour film became more widely available. These were used by photo labs to measure skin tones during the printing process. For many years, Shirley cards used only White models, which, in Ruha Benjamin’s view, essentialized whiteness as the standard for exposure by the film photography industry. Based on the final portraits for “4 Saints in 3 Acts,” the red filter appears to have contributed to the ongoing concealment of photo technologies’ ignoring the tonalities of darker skin tones. Miller had utilized “structured portrait lighting techniques she’d learned as a Vogue photographer,” Patricia Allmer wrote in an essay included in The Photographers’ Gallery exhibition catalogue. Ultimately, “4 Saints in 3 Acts” was a commercial client; the cast members themselves requested a reshoot, as they wanted usable headshots. But The Image Centre’s hanging of the cast portraits does not expand further on the significance of this request, which would have considered the way a White American female photographer with technical proficiency and modelling experience adapted to the limitations or failures of photographic technology in capturing darker skin tones.

There is no doubt that Miller’s most substantial body of work is her wartime images. She moved to London in 1940 with Roland Penrose just as Britain entered the war and began working as a photographer for British Vogue. Her assignments and editorials snapped chic women in Blitz-protecting fire masks or modelling cropped Victory bobs for factory work. The increasingly austere fashions she captured, alongside the rations imposed on paper, colour film and fabric, sharpened Miller’s eye—not to mention the extensive cabled feedback she received from her editors and even Condé Nast himself. Copies of these cables are displayed in vitrines within the fashion photography section of “Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945).”

Model wearing Bruyere windbreaker coat with military policeman, 1944, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2025. All rights reserved, www. leemiller.co.uk.

US soldiers examine a rail truck loaded with dead prisoners, 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2025. All rights reserved, www. leemiller.co.uk.

By this time, Miller was working purely with a Rolleiflex, a medium-format camera, enabling her to shoot as close as she could to the action, shaping a unique and, in the view of many scholars, surrealist-tinged photojournalist’s perspective. A strong example of this type of work is Fire Masks, 1941, a famous image where Miller shot two models wearing fire masks in front of an air-raid shelter during Germany’s Blitz campaign. Appearing to have been spontaneously captured, the photograph still has a studied surrealist quality with the heightened contrast between the female models in the clunky, metal masks and eye shields and the normalization of urban warfare. Scholar and art historian Richard Calvocoressi’s often cited comparison with this work and Henry Moore’s “The Helmet Heads” sculptures and René Magritte’s concealed faces paintings suggests that despite the snapshot immediacy of Miller’s war photography, there was a rigorous understanding of composition and art historical framing. Further, Miller was aware that her fashion photography was part of a concerted effort by British Vogue to help the Ministry of Information effectively communicate wartime measures to women, a cooperation that likely enabled British Vogue to continue publishing amid the rationings.

To The Image Centre’s credit, the war correspondent section of its Miller exhibition clarifies how much of the American photographer’s documentarian impulse also came from her writing: Miller wrote all her British Vogue captions and the accompanying articles. This writerly voice is most evident in her 1945 reports on the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. In wall-mounted vitrines, these photographs show her processing of the war’s immediate aftermath; I found particularly moving her clear-eyed perspective on the retributions that soon followed. From the bludgeoned faces of German SS camp guards to the shaved heads of women accused of being Nazi collaborators, Miller was unsparing in her survey of Europe’s wartime devastation and how “victory” wasn’t necessarily so clear-cut. A facsimile of an American Vogue June 1945 issue featured Miller’s photographs of the liberated Buchenwald camp with the stark headline “Believe It,” with a brief personal statement. “No question that German civilians knew what went on,” she wrote alongside stark imagery of dead bodies and a hanged prisoner. “I usually don’t take pictures of horrors. But don’t think that every town and every area isn’t rich with them.” Miller’s reporting coincided with a more extensive educational program happening in the United States to “bear witness” to the atrocities of the concentration camps. The exhibition often contrasts the ways in which the dissemination and circulation of her war photojournalism varied in the different international editions of Vogue. Her reporting, particularly regarding the concentration camps, was afforded more space in the American edition of Vogue, the reasoning being that this devastation was a lived, everyday reality for Europeans.

Liberated prisoners with newly dead bodies, 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2025. All rights reserved, www.leemiller.co.uk.

Released prisoners in striped prison dress beside a heap of bones from bodies burned in the crematorium, 1945, photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2025. All rights reserved, www. leemiller.co.uk.

The question that still lingers is why many of the Lee Miller exhibitions end with her WW II photojournalism. The record states that by 1946, soon after Miller covered the war’s aftermath in Austria, Hungary and Romania, her war accreditation ended. She reunited with Penrose, and after marrying and having their son in 1947, they moved to Farley Farm in the East Sussex countryside. While Penrose became consumed with his work with London’s ICA, Miller struggled to get back into filing fashion editorials for Vogue. This struggle was attributed to alcoholism and depression following her wartime experiences. Her British Vogue editor, Audrey Withers, suggested to Miller’s biographer, Carolyn Burke, that Miller came “into her own during the war. It had an extraordinary effect on her. Afterwards, nothing came up to it.”

How much did Miller’s sociality contribute to creating the scenes she captured in subsequent work? What has been suggested as her undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder following her war correspondent work—as often asserted by her son in recent writing and interviews—can’t be challenged. She survived and rekindled her artistic voice in her achievements and pleasure as an accomplished chef and the photographs she made about that engagement. It’s here where the fault lines of being just about “the work” can be found, and, in fact, the passionate, productive, non-conformative life of Lee Miller upends such framings. ❚

Rea McNamara is a writer and curator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She has curated and programmed for the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Vector Festival and the Gardiner Museum, among others.