LEE

The film

“Former Vogue cover model Lee Miller travels to the front lines of World War II as a photojournalist and goes on a mission to expose the hidden truths of Nazi Germany. But in the aftermath of betrayal, she comes to a reckoning about the truths of her own past.”

THE LONG READ

The story of Lee Miller is directed by Ellen Kuras, starring Kate Winslet as Miller, alongside Alexander Skarsgård portraying surrealist painter Roland Penrose, Miller’s second husband. The film centers on Miller’s time as a correspondent for Vogue in 1938 during World War II, and the following decade as she deals with the aftermath of war and her relationship with her surrealist friends.

The stellar cast includes Andrea Riseborough as Withers, and Marion Cotillard as Solange D’Ayen, as the staff of French Vogue. Andy Samberg appears as the photojournalist David Scherman. LEE makes it’s international world premiere in September at the Toronto Film Festival.

The foundation for the script is the 1995 authorised biography The Lives of Lee Miller, written by Miller’s son, Antony Penrose.

the many lives of LEE MILLER

It’s true that Miller lived many lives but photography was her lifelong passion as no matter which road she travelled, her camera went with her. Her life story is impossible to concertina into one feature film, so here’s a potted history of the astonishing Lee Miller.

A nineteen year old Miller was crossing a busy intersection in New York, she was nearly hit by a car when a man pulled her to safety. That knight in shining armor turned out to be Conde Nast himself and this fateful meeting led her to be anointed Vogue’s ‘modern girl’. Her incredible beauty and demeanor represented the changing times and the great photographers of her era crowned her as their muse; Edward Steichen, Nickolas Muray and Arnold Genthe.

“I would rather take a photograph than be one.”

PARIS

After two years of being the toast of the town, her modelling career stalled when Kotex (without her knowledge) used an image taken by Edward Steichen to appear in one of the first advertisements for menstrual pads with the quote ”I warn women when they have gowns fitted’ says a famous modiste.

With no more work coming her way, Miller left New York for Paris and sought out the surrealist artist Man Ray (with an introduction from Steichen) who famously never took on students and to whom she made this pronouncement:

“I’m your new student”

Miller became much more than his student. They were lovers and collaborators. Together they discovered the term “solarization.” Miller describes how the photographic technique was accidentally discovered.

“Something crawled across my foot in the darkroom and I let out a yell and turned on the light. I never did find out that it was a mouse or what. Then, I quickly realised that the film was totally exposed…Man (Ray) grabbed them, put them in hypo and looked at them later. He didn’t even bother to bawl me out, since I was so sunk. When he looked at them, the unexposed parts of the negative, which had been the black background, had been exposed by this sharp light that had been turned on and they had developed and came right up to the edge of the white, nude body. But the background and the image couldn’t heal together, so there was a line left which he called a “solarization.”

Together the two of them experimented with their newly discovered technique which came to define their work. Although Man Ray is often credited with the distinctive style, solarization belonged as much to Miller.

”The personality of the photographer, his approach, is really more important than his technical genius.”

Miller found her place at the center of the surrealist movement as a photographer. She famously photographed her friend, fellow surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim using the solarization technique.

Miller is often touted as the muse of the surrealist movement. She and Picasso were lovers, she was friends with the Eluards and famously (which did not please Man Ray) Miller played the part of the muse in Jean Cocteau’s film The Blood of a Poet .

“I keep saying to everyone, ‘I didn’t waste a minute all my life’ – but I know myself, now, that if I had it over again, I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my affection.”

In the film the statue (Miller) comes to life and the artist destroys the statue violently. The decimation of the muse is interesting if taken from Miller’s perspective. She was never happy being the “object of the gaze” she was determined to be recognised as an artist in her own right.

Her next achievement was setting up her own studio in Montparnasse. A successful business with clients ranging from Coco Chanel to Elsa Schiaparelli, Miller ended this adventure when she fell madly in love with Egyptian Aziz Eloui Bey who she swiftly married.

“I want the Utopian combination of security and freedom and emotionally, I need to be completely absorbed in some work or in a man I love.”

CAIRO

Miller shut down her studio and moved to Cairo. Her photography from this period included one of her most well known images Portrait of Space embodying the spirit of the surrealist movement.

The photograph taken near Siwa in Egypt was the inspiration for Magritte’s painting Le Baiser.

GERMANY

In September 1939, Hitler marched on Poland and France declared war against Germany. Miller joined the 83rd Infantry Division of the American Army and was the only female war correspondent. She was one of the first people to witness the concentration camp Buchenwald. Her photographs helped to send the truth back to America and the rest of the world. Along with her shocking images, one of her articles published in Vogue carried the simple headline Believe It!

“No question that German civilians knew what went on. Railway into Dachau camp runs past villa, with trains of dead or semi-dead deportees. I usually don’t take pictures of horrors. But don’t think that every town and every area isn’t rich with them. I hope Vogue will feel it can publish these pictures.”

Miller arrived in Paris on the day the city was liberated then marched with the Allies into Germany alongside her friend Life Magazine photographer David Scherman. Together they broke into Hitler’s private apartment. Miller wiped her boots fresh with the mud from the camps on Hitler’s bath mat and rinsed off in his tub. Unbeknownst to the pair, a few hours after this photograph was taken, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in their bunker.

“I’d been carrying Hitler’s Munich address around in my pocket for years and finally I had a chance to use it. But my host wasn’t home. I took some pictures of the place and also I got a good night’s sleep in his bed. I even washed the dirt of Dachau off in his tub.”

EAST SUSSEX

Returning home after the war, Miller married her long time lover, the surrealist artist Roland Penrose (Picasso biographer and the co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art, London) and together the couple set up home at Farleys, their East Sussex farmhouse and welcomed a son, Antony. Miller embarked on a new career, this time as a gourmet chef, building quite a formidable reputation as a surrealist cook!

Miller’s granddaughter Ami Bouhassane has gathered her grandmother’s favourite recipes into a cookbook. The aim is to bring the final years of Miller’s life, which were some of her most creative, back into public view. Bouhassane is quoted as saying “I got tired of the last 20 years of her life being overlooked. It happens quite a bit when creative women’s stories are told – it’s like after childbirth or around menopause their inventiveness miraculously no longer exists.”

Miller’s own childhood had a darkness that she carried through her life. We cannot truly know the harm it did to her psyche but we can surmise that the damage of a childhood rape and the untreated trauma of war culminated in alcoholism and depression in the final years of her life.

Antony Penrose was unaware of his mother’s past lives. He discovered a vast archive of Miller’s work and diaries in the attic of their family home and set about restoring her reputation as one of the iconic legends of our time.

LoveLee was created by Antony to support the preservation of Miller and Penrose’s archives and bring more awareness to the extraordinary legacy of Lee Miller. Started during the pandemic in an effort to raise funds to help sustain Farley House, members can read the love letters between Miller and Penrose, along with podcasts and other various goodies. To support click on the button below and find out more about the incredible life of one of the most important photographers of our time.

“(Being a great photojournalist is) a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.”

love lee membership

Lee Miller X Kate Winslet

LEE