The Photography of Lee Miller, a Woman Who Broke Boundaries

The achievements of numerous women artists were for a very long time excluded from art history, which was indeed contaminated by male supremacy. Over the years, things started changing little by little thanks to the feminist-led struggle for equality. During the 1970s and 1980s, the practices of some of the most important female practitioners became widely explored.

During that period, the oeuvre of Lee Miller photography emerged after her son, Anthony Penrose, discovered his mother’s archive in the attic of their family house. Thanks to his efforts, thousands of photographs, negatives, journals, and other memorabilia were thoroughly studied, conserved, and presented to the public. The story of this astonishing woman who was a Surrealist muse, fashion icon, and an excellent photographer was finally revealed.

In 2013, the Lee Miller foundation was established in England, and a lot of her negatives were properly housed, allowing experts and institutions could access them. As the interest in Miller’s art has rapidly grown, the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida is hosting her proper retrospective. TitledThe Woman Who Broke Boundaries: Photographer Lee Miller, the exhibition brings together more than 130 photographs by the groundbreaking female photographer.

The Lee Miller Story

The exhibition curated by William Jeffett, chief curator of exhibitions at The Dalí Museum, will shed new light on Miller’s portraits of important writers and artists, many of them affiliated with the Surrealist movement in Paris. The selection will also include a small portion of outstanding self-portraits she took during the liberation of France and Germany at the end of WII, as well as Lee Miller photos that illustrate how smoothly the American artists used the medium in an innovative manner. The executive director of The Dalí Museum, Dr. Hank Hine, described Lee Miller as “equally unconventional and ambitious” and as an artist who “continually reinvented herself.”

With a wry surrealist quality, her work intimately captured a range of people and historical moments; however, the passion, intensity, and restlessness of the woman behind the camera is where the most extraordinary stories can be told.

The Eye of The Tigress

In the 1920s, Miller started her career as a Vogue fashion model, and in 1929, she moved to Paris where a three-year professional and romantic partnership with American Surrealist photographer Man Ray occurred. Miller got familiar with the Surrealist circle, including artists such as Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso, made a lasting influence on Ray, who developed new solarization photographic technique thanks to her, and even ran a portrait studio of her own where she released commissions for the French edition of Vogue.

During her time in Paris, Miller photographed numerous artists including Dalí and his wife Gala. By the mid-1930s, the artist married Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and moved to Cairo. There she used to photograph the empty Egyptian desert and further explored her own Surrealist vision. In 1932, Miller got back to the U.S, opened her own portrait studio, and collaborated with publications such as Condé Nast’s Vogue. Then, a few years later, the artist returned to Europe, where she met British artist, historian, and poet, Roland Penrose. By the outbreak of World War 2, Miller excelled in her work and exhibited with the London Surrealist Group in 1940.

During the war, Miller acted as an officially accredited war correspondent within the U.S. Army, a rare position for a woman at the time. She witnessed the horrors of war, the first use of napalm bombing, the D-Day, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of Alsace, and the U.S. army’s entry into Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

After the war, the artist married Penrose and remained affiliated with key figures of the avant-garde whom she photographed for various publications. Miller continued working and was continually focused on portraiture as the only form she practiced until her death in 1977.

Lee Miller Photography at Salvador Dali Museum

Looking from a contemporary stance at Lee Miller photography archive, art and life, she was more than just a muse or an artist; she was a woman of style, politics, and firmness, the one who challenged traditionally defined roles women should not alter or reject. In brief, Miller was a heroine of her time, which is best illustrated by the iconic photograph of her taken in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub by Life photographer David E. Scherman.

The striking representation of a woman who witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp was taken at the time Miller was living in Hitler’s private apartment in Munich, after his death was announced. It shows the artist proudly taking her muddy boots, whipping the horrific dirt filled with soil, sweat, and blood on the clean towel, seizing the throne of a dictator, and reclaiming the power of a long-objectified muse.

Miller was well-aware of all the horrors she carefully documented through her lens, however, even after the war ended, she was able to remain equally devoted to the highly sophisticated style of portraiture that has influenced many in the years to come.