Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. Her father, Theodore Miller, was an enthusiastic amateur photographer and introduced techniques such as the stereograph to Miller and her two brothers. After being expelled from school in 1922, Miller moved to Paris in 1925, aged just 18, to study lighting, costume, and theatre design at the Ladislas Medgyes' School of Stagecraft. She returned to New York in 1926 to continue her theatre studies, and later in life, drawing and painting.
In 1927, Miller's modelling career launched on the cover of American Vogue, where she appeared as a drawing by the artist George Lepape. Her look embodied what Vogue's then editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase referred to as the 'modern girl', and she subsequently became much sought after by the leading photographers of the era, including Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene and Arnold Genthe. Her modelling career was successful if short-lived; after a Steichen image was licensed for a menstrual product, she quit modelling and in 1929 moved to Paris to work with the Surrealist artist Man Ray.
In Paris, Miller became both Man Ray's collaborator and his model, often accepting photographic assignments on his behalf so he could concentrate on his painting. Together, they discovered the 'solarisation' photographic technique, in which the image recorded is wholly or partially reversed in tone, and dark appears light and light appears dark. The technique is particularly notable in their collaboration, Eléctricité, commissioned by Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution de l'Elétricité, Paris in 1931. The Eléctricité portfolio of images also features Lee's abstracted torso and the 'photogram' technique, which Man Ray called 'Rayograms'.
During her time in Paris, Miller would create some of her most iconic Surrealist works, including portraits, drawings, street scenes and abstractions. Images like Exploding Hand (1930) exemplifies what the founder of Surrealism, André Breton, described as 'convulsive beauty'. She also created radical, abstract nudes, which have been described as transforming the female torso into a phallus. In the early 1930s, she acted in Jean Cocteau's landmark Surrealist film The Blood of a Poet, and was exhibited by the American gallerist Julien Levy in the 'American Photography Retrospective'.
Lee Miller returned to New York in 1932 and set up the Lee Miller Studio, specialising in celebrity portraiture, fashion and advertising photography. Despite the Great Depression, she enjoyed a successful career photographing (and occasionally modelling) for American Vogue, and taking commissions for clients such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein. In 1934, Miller married the Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, and briefly relocated to Cairo, Egypt, falling in love with the desert and travel. A few years later, she would meet the British Surrealist artist Roland Penrose at a friend's costume party and join him in London in 1939, just as Britain was entering World War Two. Unable to continue her work with American Vogue, Miller volunteered to cover the war effort for British Vogue in 1940, contributing to monthly fashion shoots, pattern books and knitwear features focusing on women's safety and styling during the war period.
Later, her contributions evolved into journalistic coverage of the war and in 1944 Miller became a correspondent for the US Army. She was one of only a few women to cover the front-line in Europe. During the war, Miller documented the Liberation of Paris, fighting in Luxembourg and Alsace, the Buchenwald and Dachau Concentration Camps, children dying in Vienna, peasant life in devastated post-war Hungary and Hitler's Munich home – where her friend, the LIFE photographer David E. Sherman helped her capture the now iconic picture of Miller bathing in Hitler's bathtub. One particularly striking image from this period, a quiet portrait of the Bürgermeister (mayor) of Leipzig's daughter, shortly after the family’s collective suicide, maintains Miller's Surrealist sensibility.
Like so many who experienced the war, Miller returned home scarred and likely with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. In 1947, she married Ronald Penrose and gave birth to a son, Antony. The family moved to Farley's House, a farm in the British countryside, where they continued to work and entertain their extended network of Surrealist friends and family, which included the artists Max Ernst, Elieen Agar, Dorothea Tanning, Picasso, Man Ray and Nusch and Paul Éluard.
Despite suffering from depression, Miller continued to contribute both written and photographic articles for numerous magazines, including her ongoing collaborations with Vogue. In the 1950s, she enjoyed a late career as a gourmet chef, attending a Cordon Bleu cooking course in Paris, and creating bespoke, often Surrealist-inspired meals for artist events, including Picasso's exhibition at the Tate gallery in 1960 (curated by Roland Penrose) and Man Ray's exhibition opening of Inventor, Painter, Poet at the New York Cultural Centre in 1974.
Miller was diagnosed with cancer in 1976 and passed away at her beloved Farley's House on 21 July 1977, aged 70. Her incredible career and legacy lives on, with over 10 published books, major international exhibitions including the V&A's own, The Art of Lee Miller in 2007 and a feature length film, LEE, starring Kate Winslet, released in 2024.
Farley's House continues to be a site of artistic and Surrealist interest, celebrating 75 years in 2024. It is now run as a foundation and a gallery by Antony Penrose and his daughter, Ami Bouhassane, who continue to inspire the world through the work of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose.
