The view through the lens of a camera obsessed Lee Miller. In an artistic career that spanned four decades, she produced several distinct bodies of highly individualistic photographic images. At the time Lee Miller died of cancer in 1977, however, she had effectively shut off access to her career as a photographer. Her photographs and negatives were not cataloged in any readily available archive, but had been left in disorder around her house and in the offices of Vogue magazine.
Until recently, if Lee Miller was remembered, it was as Man Ray's lover and as a stunningly beautiful model. The exhibition Lee Miller: Photographer makes abundantly clear, however, that Miller was a formidable artist in her own right.
Organized by Jane Livingston for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this comprehensive survey is the first solo museum retrospective of Miller's photographs in the United States. Livingston's exhibition offers a striking revisionist portrait of Miller that establishes her as one of the most gifted photographers of this century. Often theatrical, but almost always factual, Miller's best photographs are dramatically sensual reinventions that reflect the vibrant life of an artist whose career encompassed some of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century.
Self-destructive Liaisons
Miller's father was an engineer, a man whose work and private pursuits were equally obsessed with modernism. One of Theodore Miller's preoccupations was photography, and he used his youthful daughter as a model of his stereoscopic nude studies. Lee inherited not only a lifetime interest in innovation from her father, but also numerous psychological problems that were to plague her throughout her life. Most of her affairs with men turned out to be a series of intense and often self-destructive liaisons followed by equally traumatic breakups. Strikingly, Miller's work habits as a photographer were marked by a similarly ambivalent rhythm--bursts of intense creativity inevitably followed by prolonged periods of inactivity.
Miller was a precocious eighteen-year-old when she first traveled to Paris in 1925. Her classic features and ready wit afforded her instant entrée into a circle of artists, poets, and literary figures that reads like a Who's Who of Modernism. Miller spent her time with people including Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and, most significantly for Miller, the American expatriate photographer and artist Man Ray. Returning to New York City from her year abroad, Miller began studies at the Art Students League. While walking down a crowded midtown street one day, she was saved form an incipient auto accident by a fellow pedestrian. Recognizing her rare beauty, the pedestrian, Conde Nast of Vogue magazine, recruited Miller on the spot as a model. Miller's refined but expressive features meshed perfectly with the sensibilities of leading New York fashion photographers such as Edward Steichen and Arnold Genthe, who dominated Vogue's studios in the 1920s.
Talk of surrealism
Miller returned to Paris in 1929 and quickly reestablished her presence in the Parisian artistic circles dominated by talk of Surrealism. Using the darkroom as his laboratory of the subconscious, Man
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