Book 'Lee Miller's War'

Photgrapher Lee Miller

Photographer
Lee Miller

Lee Miller

Lee Miller’s work for Vogue from 1941-1945 sets her apart as a photographer and writer of extraordinary ability. She has joined the ranks of those rare war correspondents and photographers whose vision goes far beyond mere reportage and commands the attention of generations. The quality of her photography from the period has long been recognized as outstanding. Now, for the first time, its full range is shown and it is accompanied by her brilliant text.

Lee Miller hustled her way into Vogue as a photographer in the early 1940s, but bored with mundane assignments and utterly frustrated that the biggest story of her life was taking place without her, she then managed to secure accreditation to the US Armed Forces as a war correspondent. From that point, Vogue’s coverage took on a quality more usually associated with the best news magazines.

For a woman to have had the determination, guts and courage to achieve this role at that time was extraordinary. For that woman to have been Lee Miller was little short of a miracle. She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907 and had been ‘discovered’ by Condé Nast in 1927 as the beauty of her generation. She went on to be a fashion model, immortalized by the greatest photographers; she was the protégée and lover of Man Ray and a fine, renowned and innovative photographer in her own right; she was a central character in the circle of the Surrealists and the friend of many great artists. When the war broke out, Lee was enjoying what appeared to be a charmed life in Britain, living with Roland Penrose and at the center of a unique social and artistic circle which included some of the liveliest minds of a generation. She happily gave all this up to get to the front.

Dressed in olive drab, winning the affection of soldiers of all ranks, armed with a battered Baby Hermes typewriter, basic camera equipment and an iron will, she went straight to the heart of the grim and gripping business of war. She found it agony to commit events to paper but her voracious appetite to be a witness of military action and human reaction led to an enormous output of words. Her writing manages to combine immediacy with acute observation, and deep personal involvement with professional detachment. It also has a strong sense of the ridiculous in its humor.

Complementing this natural talent in writing are two hundred remarkable photographs from the Lee Miller Archives, many previously unpublished. With their own quality of surrealist irony, which at times verges on the horrific and at others on the hilarious, they show war-ravaged cities, buildings and landscapes but above all war resilient people – soldiers, leaders, medics, evacuees, prisoners of war, the wounded, the villains and the heroes.

There is the raw edge of combat portrayed during the siege of St. Malo and the bitterly fought Alsace campaign, and the disbelief and outrage she describes at being amongst the first to witness the victims of Dachau. The horror is relieved by the spirit of post-Liberation Paris. Here she indulged in frivolous fashions and recorded memorable conversations with Picasso, Cocteau, Eluard, Aragon and Colette. She ends with a first-on-the-scene report giving a sardonic descriptions of Hitler’s abandoned house in Munich and the looting and burning of his alpine fortress at Berchtesgaden, which marks a symbolic end to the war.

David Scherman, the renowned war photo-journalist and close friend of Lee Miller’s, who shared many of these assignments with her, has provided a fascinating foreword.

Antony Penrose is the son of Lee Miller and curator of the Lee Miller Archives. He is the author of the biography The Lives of Lee Miller. He farms in Sussex and is chairman of Timber Management Ltd, a company dedicated to the conservational management of British timber. A photographer and film-maker, he is also a director of the Gardner Arts Centre at the University of Sussex. He is married with three children.