Lee Miller

She was known primarily as the muse and lover of the Surrealist artist Man Ray until her son's discovery and promotion of her work established her reputation as an art and war photographer.

Lee Miller studied at Beaux-Arts de Paris, Art Students League of New York and Oakwood Friends School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is photography. Places of work recorded in the authority are United States, Paris and New York City. Residence is recorded at Cairo and Chiddingly. Work by Lee Miller is recorded in the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum.

• Name — Lee Miller • Birth Name — Elizabeth Miller • Born — 23 April 1907 • Birthplace — Poughkeepsie, New York, U.S. • Died — 21 July 1977 • Place of death — Chiddingly, East Sussex, UK • Children — Antony Penrose • Field — Photojournalism • Movement — Surrealism • Website — leemiller.co.uk

Miller was born on April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her parents were Theodore Miller (1872—1971) and Florence Miller (née MacDonald, 1881—1954). Her father was of German descent, and her mother was of Scottish and Irish descent. She had a younger brother named Erik, and her older brother was the aviator Johnny Miller. Theodore always favored Lee, and often used her as a model for his amateur photography. When she was seven years old, Lee was raped while staying with a family friend in Brooklyn and was infected with gonorrhea. In her childhood, Miller was expelled from almost every school she attended while living in the Poughkeepsie area. In 1925, aged 18, Miller moved to Paris in France, where she studied lighting, costume, and design at the Ladislas Medgyes' School of Stagecraft. She returned to New York in 1926 and joined an experimental drama program at Vassar College, taught by Hallie Flanagan, a pioneer of experimental theatre. Soon afterwards, Miller left home at 19 and enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan to study life drawing and painting.

Miller's father introduced her and her brothers to photography at an early age. She was his model – he took many photographs, including stereoscopic images, of his teenage daughter, some nude – and showed her technical aspects of the art. At 19, she nearly stepped in front of a car on a Manhattan street but was prevented by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue magazine. This incident helped launch her modeling career; she appeared in a blue hat and pearls in a drawing by George Lepape on the cover of Vogue on March 15, 1927. Miller's look was what Vogues then editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase was looking for to represent the emerging idea of the "modern girl". On the advice of the illustrator Neysa McMein, she adopted the name "Lee". For the next two years, Miller was one of the most sought-after models in New York, photographed by leading fashion photographers, including Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, Nickolas Muray, and George Hoyningen-Huene. Kotex used a photograph of Miller by Steichen to advertise their menstrual pads without her knowledge. She was hired by a fashion designer in 1929 to make drawings of fashion details in Renaissance paintings but, in time, grew tired of this and found photography more efficient.

• Illustration — Miller in 1943 with other female war correspondents who covered the U.S. Army in the European Theater during World War II; from left to right: Mary Welsh, Dixie Tighe, Kathleen Harriman, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Tania Long At the outbreak of World War II, Miller was living at Downshire Hill in Hampstead, London, with Penrose when Germany's aerial bombardment of the city began. Ignoring pleas from friends and family to return to the U.S., Miller embarked on a new career in photojournalism as the official war photographer for Vogue, documenting what became known as the Blitz. Because the British Army would not let her accompany them, she managed to be accredited with the U.S. Army instead as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942. Miller's first article for British Vogue was on nurses at an army base in Oxford. She took portraits of nurses across Europe, including those on the front lines and prisoners of war. Following the D-Day invasion of France in 1944, Miller was tasked with reporting on what she was told was the newly-liberated town of Saint-Malo. She travelled there only to find that the city was still being heavily fought over. Miller's military accreditation as a female war correspondent did not allow her to enter an active combat zone. Still, rather than leave, she decided to stay, and spent five days on the front lines photographing as much of the Battle of Saint-Malo as she could. Her photographs included the first recorded use of napalm. When the military authorities realized where she was, they put Miller under temporary house arrest and placed strict limits on her movements. While she was working with Vogue during World War II, Miller's goal was to "document war as historical evidence". Her work provided "context for events" and "an eye-witness account" of the casualties of war. Miller's work was very specific and surrealist, like her previous publications and modelling with Vogue. She spent time composing her photographs, famously framing some from inside the cattle trains that had transported thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps. Miller's work with Vogue during wartime was often a combination of journalism and art, sometimes manipulated to evoke strong emotions. Miller teamed up with American photojournalist David E. Scherman, a Life magazine correspondent, on many assignments, including the liberation of Paris, the Battle of Alsace, and the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. She sent a telegram “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.” back to the British Vogue editor, Audrey Withers, urging her to publish photojournalism from the camps. She did this following a CBS broadcast from Buchenwald by Edward R. Murrow, and Richard Dimbleby's BBC broadcast from inside Bergen-Belsen to overcome people's disbelief at such atrocities. American and British Vogue published her reports headlined "BELIEVE IT" and "GERMANS ARE LIKE THIS." Scherman's iconic photograph of Miller sitting in the bathtub in Adolf Hitler's private apartment in Munich, with the dried mud of that morning's visit to Dachau on her boots deliberately dirtying Hitler's bathroom, was taken on the evening of April 30, 1945, coincidentally the same day that Hitler committed suicide. After posing for the bathtub photograph, Miller took a bath in the tub, and then slept in Hitler's bed. She was also photographed in Eva Braun's bed. During this period, Miller photographed dying children in a Vienna hospital, peasant life in post-war Hungary, corpses of Nazi officers and their families, and finally, the execution of former Hungarian Prime Minister László Bárdossy. After the war, she continued working for Vogue for another two years, covering fashion and celebrities.

After returning to Britain from central Europe, Miller suffered severe episodes of clinical depression that her son believes was due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He also described her alcoholism and recovery from alcohol abuse in his 1985 biography, The Lives of Lee Miller. In November 1946, Miller was commissioned by British Vogue to illustrate an article titled "When James Joyce Lived in Dublin", by Joyce's old friend and confidant Constantine Curran. Following a list given to her by Curran, Miller photographed numerous places and people in Dublin, many with a connection to Joyce. The article and photographs appeared in American Vogue in May 1947 and British Vogue in 1950. The photos provide a remarkable record of Joyce's hometown and Dublin during that time. In 1946, Miller travelled with Roland Penrose to the United States, where she visited Man Ray in California. After she discovered she was pregnant by Penrose, she divorced Bey and, on May 3, 1947, married Penrose. Their only son, Antony Penrose, was born on September 9, 1947. In 1949, the couple bought Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex. During the 1950s and 1960s, Farley Farm became a sort of artistic Mecca for visiting artists such as Picasso, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Jean Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst. While Miller continued to do the occasional photo shoot for Vogue, she soon discarded the darkroom for the kitchen, becoming a gourmet cook. According to her housekeeper Patsy, she specialized in "historical food" such as roast suckling pig, as well as treats such as marshmallows in a cola sauce (especially made to annoy the English critic Cyril Connolly who told her Americans did not know how to cook). Miller also provided photographs for her husband's biographies of Picasso and Antoni Tàpies. However, images from the war, especially of the concentration camps, continued to haunt her, and she started on what her son later described as a "downward spiral". Her depression may have been accelerated by her husband's long affair with the trapeze artist Diane Deriaz. Miller was investigated by the British security service MI5 during the 1940s and 1950s, on suspicion of being a Soviet spy. In October 1969, Miller was asked in an interview with a New York Times reporter what drew her to photography. Her response was that it was "a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you."

Miller died of lung cancer at Farley Farm House in 1977, aged 70. She was cremated, and her ashes were spread through her herb garden at Farley.

• 2001: Roland Penrose and Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh • 2007–2008: The Art of Lee Miller, Victoria and Albert Museum, London • 2008: Philadelphia Museum of Art • 2008: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art • 2008–2009: Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume • 2015: Lee Miller and Picasso, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh • 2015–2016: Lee Miller, Albertina, Vienna • Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale • Berliner Festspiele: Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin • 2018–2019: Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield • Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona • 2023–2024: Surrealist Lee Miller, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne • 2024: Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932–1945), The Image Centre, Toronto • 2024: Lee Miller, Saint-Malo under Siege August 1944, Sainte-Victoire Chapel, Saint-Malo • 2025: Lee Miller in Print, FOMU, Antwerp • 2025–2026: Lee Miller, Tate Britain, London; travels to Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris • 2026: Fearless, The Art Institute of Chicago

The authorities additionally record the headings Elizabeth Miller, Lady Penrose Miller, Elizabeth Miller Penrose, Lady Penrose and Miss Lee Miller. Her recorded language was English. She married Roland Penrose and Aziz Eloui Bey. One child is recorded: Antony Penrose.

Lee Miller is recorded as having studied at Beaux-Arts de Paris, Art Students League of New York and Oakwood Friends School.