One hundred years ago, in 1907, Elizabeth Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. Lee Miller died in Sussex, England, 70 years later. She would have deserved a place in twentieth-century cultural history for any one of her careers; the spectacular success of them all makes her a phenomenon. Model, studio photographer, Surrealist muse, photojournalist, war correspondent, cordon bleu cook – her work reflected many of the myriad facets of the century she made her own.

Early life and influences

How all Lee Miller’s different incarnations fit together has been described as a Surrealist puzzle, which is how Picasso painted her in 1937 – and similar to some of her creations. In fact she was her own creation, her temperament forged early. Her father, Theodore Miller, was an engineer and keen amateur photographer, experimenting in stereoscopic projection. He photographed his daughter constantly and encouraged her to learn. Many studies show Elizabeth nude, alone or with friends, from childhood until her twenties. This uninhibited approach no doubt fostered the ease with the human body evident in Lee Miller’s own work and in her modeling. A less pleasant legacy of childhood was the rape by a family friend when she was seven, necessitating treatment for trauma and venereal disease.

During and after turbulent schooldays, Miller was fascinated by theater and movies. Ever practical, she involved herself with lighting as well as acting. The movies provided role models like Clara Bow and Louise Brooks -- twenties flappers wearing short skirts and bobbed hair. Coco Chanel made suntans, sailcloth and masculine designs fashionable. A visit to Paris in 1925 revealed the design revolution later known as Art Deco, and the transforming effect of electric light on the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. Elizabeth reinvented herself as Lee, the androgyny of the name echoed by the boyish haircut.

Lee spent seven months in Paris on this first visit, studying lighting, costume and stage design at Ladislas Medgyès’ Ecole pour la Technique du Théâtre. Back in New York, she enrolled at Vassar College to study dramatic production and threw herself into the theater scene as producer and spectator.

A chance encounter – and a new career

Working in New York as a lingerie model in 1926 and learning life drawing and painting at night school, Lee Miller was (so the story goes) about to step into the path of a car when a passer-by stopped her. The restraining hand was that of Condé Nast and thus began Lee’s long association with Vogue. She appeared on the cover the following March, in a design by Art Deco illustrator Georges Lepape. Arnold Genthe made soft-focus studies of her in the style of la belle époque. She embodied the 1920s’ look for Edward Steichen, chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair – another Condé Nast publication. Her height, slender figure, poise and strong profile gave him an ideal subject and his portraits have great elegance and beauty.

In 1929, Lee returned to Europe. Commissioned to make studies of Renaissance ornamentation for a New York fashion house, she spent time in Florence drawing and recording details with a folding camera and tripod. Back in Paris, determined to be a photographer and armed with a letter of introduction from Steichen, she sought out Man Ray. The three years she spent with him (as lover, pupil and collaborator) were stormy, but crucial to her art. Lee continued to work for French Vogue, now on both sides of the camera, meeting and learning from Horst P. Horst and George Hoyningen-Huené.

The Man behind Lee Miller

But it was Man Ray who most influenced her, visually and technically. He used small cameras and composed his images by cropping the negative. He had discovered that a photographic phenomenon known as solarization could be used to great Surrealist effect, giving brightly lit surfaces very hard, dark edges. Man Ray was also adept at retouching his prints directly with a Jenner – a tiny blade named after the eighteenth-century immunologist. It took Lee just a year to learn these advanced darkroom techniques – in addition to the principles of portrait and fashion photography.

She and Ray collaborated on many projects and used each other as models. Lee started flying solo when she took on some of Ray’s own commissions, then securing her own. She photographed Mina Loy, Salvador Dali, Charlie Chaplin… The lighting and angle of these portraits seem to reach the very heart of the sitter.

Other works from around 1930 show Lee’s Surrealist take on her surroundings. There is Chaplin with a chandelier apparently emerging from the top of his head, a woman and child in a clinic, seemingly part of the consultation scene painted on the wall behind them, flowers in a park encased in paper to prevent cross-pollination, rocks whose smooth curves resemble the human body. Lee’s camera recorded street scenes in fragments: ironwork, a staircase, bird cages in a window, rats lined up on a ledge, carrousel horses. She captured fleeting gestures: a hand in silhouette or arranging curls, two priests on a parapet addressing an unseen crowd. And the iconic exploding hand. Photographed outside the Guerlain parfumerie in Paris, it shows both the inside of the shop and the trees reflected in the glass door. The flash is an electric charge caused by numerous large diamonds scraping the glass as the elegant customer turns the door handle.

New York, New York

In the autumn of 1932, Lee left Man Ray and returned to New York. As well as working for American Vogue, she set up Lee Miller Studios with her younger brother Erik, backed by wealthy financiers. Her connections allowed her to get by in lean times and she put Man Ray’s techniques to good use in her portraits and studies. Advertising contracts for Mary Chess and Elizabeth Arden came along, and a major boost came from Julien Levy. From a monied New York background, Levy was determined to promote photography as an art form. He had worked in Paris with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray and his Madison Avenue gallery showcased their work along with Lee Miller’s. An active proponent of Surrealism, Levy introduced Lee to Joseph Cornell whose “objects” inspired her own creativity.

One of Lee Miller’s last and most prestigious New York projects was as official photographer for the opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” which opened on Broadway in February 1933 and ran for 60 performances. Vanity Fair named Lee as one of seven “most distinguished photographers” in May 1934, with Beaton, Genthe and Huené. But she had lost her taste for commercial photography and fallen in love with Aziz Eloui Bey. They married in Manhattan in July 1934 and moved to Egypt in September.

To Egypt and back

It took a while for Lee to recover her enthusiasm for her art. She relished her place in a prominent Cairo family, discovering the harem and astonishing its inmates with her life and work. When she returned again to photography, the results were haunting evocations of details, landscapes and architecture: snails on a tree, a stairway with a window covered with a torn cloth, ruins in the desert, monastery buildings. Her 1937 “Portrait of Space” has an empty rectangle framed in a window. Just below, a triangular hole in the mosquito net frames a distant sand dune. The various versions that exist show Lee experimenting with these elements before settling on an entirely satisfying composition, published in the London Bulletin in July 1940.

With the generous support of her husband, Lee returned to Paris in summer 1937, rediscovering freedom, the avant-garde and creativity. She also met English Surrealist painter Roland Penrose, later her second husband. Over the next two years, separately or together, they moved between France, England, Egypt, Greece and Romania, writing, painting and photographing. Lee’s studies of Romanian folk culture were a precursor to her work as the war correspondent she later became. In June 1939 she finally left Cairo and Bey for London and Penrose.

From Vogue to the war

In spite of her track record, British Vogue had no place for Lee Miller in 1939. She nonetheless did whatever jobs she could – unpaid – until 1940, when many staff had left for military service. Over the next four years, she produced fashion, portraits and documentary, shooting in the studio and out, in spite of the Blitz. Her book Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain under Fire came out in 1941. In the same year, Life photographer David E. Scherman joined its London staff. Together they produced a spread “Night Life Now” about a Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (army) searchlight crew.

As an American citizen, Lee obtained official accreditation as a US army war correspondent in 1942. In 1943, she produced her first article about American army nurses and photographed intrepid war correspondent Margaret Bourke White. The following August came a portrait – words and pictures – of Ed Murrow. In September, she filed a deeply moving photo-reportage, “Unarmed Warriors”, about field hospital workers behind the lines in Normandy. Graphic pieces followed on the liberation of Paris, the siege and surrender of Saint-Malo, German destruction in the Loire Valley – interspersed with reports on the Paris collections and performances by Fred Astaire and Marlene Dietrich.

1945 saw Lee in Germany, reporting the war and its aftermath for London and New York. She gave full vent to her revulsion and contempt for the connivance of “ordinary” Germans with the horrors of the SS. Well-fed German children appeared alongside shots of starved prisoners, neat villages next to neat lines of ovens. Two studies stick in the mind: a dead SS guard in a canal is a peaceful, almost lyrical composition. That of the suicide daughter of the Bürgermeister (mayor) of Leipzig is starkly uncompromising. But Lee kept a sense of humour throughout. First to go in, she photographed Hitler’s apartment in Munich in all its banality – and Scherman photographed her in Hitler’s bath. Subsequent reports from Vienna, Hungary and Romania confirmed her status as war correspondent – and Vogue’s as a serious publication.

After war

Post-war Vogue’s preoccupations with society must have seemed stale and superficial by contrast. Inevitably, Lee suffered from stress, which led to alcoholism and the use of stimulants and depressants. But she never lost what her editor Audrey Withers called her “tremendous zest for life in all its variety,” and she continued to work occasionally until 1956.

Her son, Antony Penrose, was born in 1947, giving her a new subject and inspiring her to write unillustrated articles. Her happy domestic life in rural Sussex, where Lee practiced cordon bleu cooking for strings of visitors, inspired a richly funny photo-reportage “Working Guests” in which celebrities and intellectuals weed and water the garden, hem curtains, or feed pigs while the hostess snoozes on a sofa. Her last piece for Vogue, “What they see in Cinema” is a brilliant apology for what the French call “le septième art.” In it, Lee recalls the making of Jean Cocteau’s first film, “The Blood of a Poet” in Paris in 1931. It featured – in three separate roles – Lee Miller…

Sadly, Lee was estranged from her adult son until the last year of her life. She had put aside her former lives, so Antony Penrose only discovered their full extent after her death. Since then, he has worked tirelessly to create the Lee Miller Archive, gathering an impressive collection and creating a state-of-the-art website, www.leemiller.co.uk.