Lee Miller

Lee Miller first entered the world of photography as a high fashion model in 1920’s New York. Working with some of the greatest photographers of the day, such as Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene and Arnold Genthe, Lee’s modelling career was incredibly successful if short-lived. Deciding she would ‘rather take a picture than be one’, in 1929 she moved to Paris to work with the well-known Surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray.  

It wasn’t long until Lee established her own photographic studio in the city, working as a commercial portrait and fashion photographer. Lee’s most enduring body of work from this time is her surrealist images of street scenes and studio experimentation, when she re-discovered the Sabattier Effect, a photographic technique later popularized as ‘Solarisation‘, with Man Ray.  

Lee returned to New York in 1932, and, once more, established a successful photographic studio on the other side of the Atlantic, despite the economic depression in the USA. A new adventure presented itself when Lee married the wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, and moved with him to Cairo in Egypt, where she became fascinated by precarious, long-range desert travel. Free from the constraints of harnessing photography to make a living, Lee could now take photos purely for herself.  

During a visit to Paris in 1937 she met Roland Penrose, the surrealist artist who was to become her second husband, and travelled with him to Greece and Romania. In 1939 she definitively left Egypt for London shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. She moved in with Roland and, defying orders from the US Embassy to return to America, took a job as a freelance photographer for Vogue. 

In 1944 Lee became a correspondent accredited to the US Army, and often teamed up with her friend, the LIFE Magazine photographer David E. Scherman. She followed the US troops overseas after D Day, becoming one of only a few women combat photojournalists to cover the front-line war in Europe. Lee documented the siege of St Malo, the Liberation of Paris, the fighting in Luxembourg and Alsace, the Russian/American link up at Torgau, and the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau Concentration Camps. 

Witnessing many of the major events of the Second World War, Lee was billeted in both Hitler and Eva Braun’s houses in Munich, and photographed Hitler’s house, Wachenfeld at Berchtesgaden, in flames on the eve of Germany’s surrender. Penetrating deep into Eastern Europe, she covered harrowing scenes of children dying in Vienna, peasant life in devastated post-war Hungary and finally the execution of Prime Minister Lazlo Bardossy. 

Post-war, Lee continued to contribute to Vogue, covering fashion and celebrity culture, including portraits of renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Following the birth of their son, Antony Penrose, Lee and Roland re-located to Farleys, a farm in the East Sussex countryside. There, Lee moved away from professional photography. In the last two decades of her life, she became a celebrated, award-winning cook, known for her dishes inspired by Surrealism. Lee died at Farleys in 1977.