Lee Miller: a photography icon

Lee Miller: a photography icon Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso were all counted among the artist friends of the American photographer Lee Miller. Together they used new darkroom techniques like solarisation for artistic effect, with an image that is partially reversed in tone. She soon moved again, however, spending the rest of the decade travelling. When World War II officially broke out, Miller was living in London with Penrose and chronicling the blitzed city for Vogue. In 1942 she managed to become an accredited field correspondent with the US Army, an impressive step thinking about that the British were not accepting any women in this position. As a model in New York, Lee Miller had two years of fame posing for renowned photographers including Edward Steichen and Arnold Genthe. Miller lived in Cairo with her first husband, Aziz Eloui Bey. When she and fellow war reporter David E Scherman found themselves in Munich in Hitler's old apartment around the time that he committed suicide in Berlin, they lived there for three days. Her dispatches on field hospitals in Normandy, the Liberation of Paris, the fighting around the German-occupied citadel in St Malo, and the death camps of Dachau and Buchenwald used surrealist imagery to portray the horror of what had actually and unbelievably happened. She worked in the Egyptian deserts in Egypt, producing works with abstract titles such as Portraits of Space. This exhibition at Øregaard includes photographs from many periods of her life, organised by the Lee Miller Archive in England and the Mjellby Konstmuseum in Halmstad in Sweden. Her creativity and technique during this period resulted in some of the most radical nudes of the time - described as transforming the female torso into a phallus. From 1932-1934, Miller was back in New York. Her work included celebrity portraits, fashion and advertising work, done with an eye for odd juxtaposition and humour. In 1937, while visiting in Paris she fell in love with the British surrealist painter Roland Penrose and travelled with him in England, France and Romania, documenting the journeys extensively. Her work spotted the absurd horrors of war and its leaders with striking and memorable visual style as well as content. With this creative use of imagery and ideas, Lee Miller broadened the definition of photojournalism and expanded the notion of documentary. Miller made portraits and satirical drawings, and photographed enigmatic street scenes and elegant near-abstractions. Lee Miller: a photography icon Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 03/06/2012