The Art of Lee Miller by Mark Haworth-Booth

It is little wonder that an earlier work on this artist was entitled “The Lives of Lee Miller” since she seems to have packed the living of more than one extraordinary life into her own.

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York 1907. Her father, a keen amateur, photographed her constantly as she was growing up and familiarised her with some of the technical aspects of the art. Serendipity then played a part in what followed as, when crossing a Manhattan street she was `discovered’ at 19 by magazine publisher Condé Nast and a modelling career followed. Moving to Paris(1929)she became the assistant, lover, muse and finally a collaborator of Man Ray, also putting in an appearance as a `living statue’ in Cocteau’s “The Blood of a Poet”(1930) and was a significant figure in the surrealist movement.
She returned to New York in 1932 and established a portrait gallery only to marry and moved to Egypt a couple of years later. Although not working as a photographer during this period she took some of her most arresting images.
In 1937 she returned to Paris and by the outbreak of the Second World War was living in London, beginning the most remarkable phase of her professional life. As a photojournalist she documented the Blitz before becoming the only female photographer to travel with the troops across Europe in the immediate aftermath of D-Day. As well as the liberation of Paris she saw and photographed the horrors of the concentration camps.

Drained by her wartime experiences she essentially retired to a `normal’ life in Sussex, before her death in 1977.

This book collects images from all periods of the artist’s life and many of the images are by others, either featuring her as a model or as being of influence or importance to the artist’s work. I was impressed by the range and quality of Lee Miller’s own work, particularly the pre-war pictures, many of which are truly striking. I was already familiar with many, but not all, of the wartime images from the earlier “Lee Miller’s War“. If it is the wartime images you are interested in it is probably the better buy and I would trade its introduction by David E. Scherman for all the text in this book.
As I mentioned earlier many of the photographs are, of course, of her by others and it is fascinating to see the way she switches from one side of the camera to the other.

The text is well written and insightful, but can be a little dry and scholarly, concentrating its attention very much on the work rather than her life, as a biography “Lee Miller: A Life” would be better here. If there is a criticism to be made, it is that, because for much of her career she was working within constraints placed upon her by her various paymasters/editors a good deal of the material presented is of the more commercial/mundane variety. This, while a significant part of her working life, is given too much weight in the text, and presumably, reproduced at the expense of some of the more interesting images that are occasionally referred to in the text but not displayed.

The book is a good size, the pictures are well reproduced and all the most famous images are here as well as some very striking newer ones. Whether as an introduction to the `lives’ of Lee Miller or as an extension to an existing collection this is an excellent work.

Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke

Lee Miller is an enigma- though Carolyn Burke tells us a lot about her incredible life. As a biography, this is an honorable book. It is comprehensive and tells us about the fabulous life and career of a woman who participated in some of the most exciting times of the 20th century. From NY in the 20s to the Paris of Surrealists in the early 30s, back to NY and then to Egypt and the middle east. By this time Lee Miller was only 30 and some of her greatest adventures were ahead as Vogue’s war correspondent and photographer during World War II in Europe. Her work continued during the immediate post war era and Ms. Burke’s book illumniates some of the problems of post war Europe, which calls to mind some of the dislocation and problems currently in Iraq.
The portraits in the book make it clear that Lee Miller was a great beauty and the photos she took make it clear she was talented. Yet her precipitous decline after the war and her marriage to Roland Penrose is depressing and hard to figure out. As carefully as Ms. Burke’s shares the facts of the book and even her occasional forays into trying to psychoanalyze Lee’s motivation, I, like other reviewers found it hard to deciper who Lee really was. A great beauty, a madcap free spirit,a sexually free but emotionally closed woman, a deeply injured child of abuse, an alcohol abuser and indifferent mother to her only child could accurately describe her. Was she a victim of the post war attitudes towards women in the 1950s as she gave up her work to become an uber-housewife and chef in her English country home? It calls to my mind David Hare’s play ” Plenty” that portrayed the severe dislocation of a woman who had worked in France for the Resistance during WWII and then proceeded to destroy her life and injure those around her in the post war years. Ms. Burke suggest post traumatic stress as a source of Lee’s post war problems. As one of the first people to photograph the concentration camps at the end of the war, Lee took breathtaking and disturbing images that affect us today- hard to imagine the affect of actually being there.
Most of the correspondence Ms.Burke quotes made it clear Lee Miller didn’t share her deepest feelings with others in letters. Perhaps she didn’t in person either- since her son only found out about her wartime work after her death when he discovered boxes of her negatives and photo work. She remains an enigma today. While this biography tells us about her, it can’t unlock who she really was beneath the glamour and sadness of her life. I think there is a great movie here.

The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose

First I want to state that this is a very fine biography, the author (Miller’s son) does an admirable job of showing the many different sides and personalities of a multi-gifted woman whose life spanned the tumultuous revolution of women’s roles in society. But Lee Miller led a very complicated and somewhat contradictory life and the author manages (artifully, I admit)to avoid probing too deeply into the dark corners that would truly flesh out her life. There are crucial points in the book where a gentle fog of vagueness creeps in where an objective biographer would have strove for clarity, i.e. what exactly was the nature of her relationship with her father? He clearly had a huge role in her life and career (he began photographing her nude at a very early age)but the treatment of their relationship is ginger to say the very least. But issues outside the family are well covered, inside not so much. So to sum up, a good general bio but it is neither too critical nor too in depth on certain issues.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: A Novel by Rebecca Miller

Pippa Lee is one of the most complex and intriguing creations in contemporary fiction and it is a mark of Rebecca Miller’s skill as a writer that what begins as an extremely entertaining and compelling account of a middle-aged woman’s marriage to an older man turns into a fascinating portrait of a life lived strangely. The leap back into time that takes you to Pippa’s childhood is both abrupt and seamless (if that’s not too much of a contradiction!) and by the time she’s returned you to the present day your sense of Pippa’s many lives has been expanded and deepened in the most satisfying of ways.

This book is a reminder of just how much someone can change in the course of a lifetime and, as well as providing a wise insight into the different courses a life can take, the novel also becomes increasingly page-turning as the book speeds to its dramatic conclusion.

I’m glad I read this novel and I’ve just learnt that it has been picked as one of Richard and Judy’s Summer reading titles which is great for the book and great for readers because now even more people are going to enjoy this superb debut novel. Take your shoes off, kick back and immerse yourself in what is sure to become one of the most talked about and loved books of the summer.

“… the counter of her local restaurant while reading biographies of Lee Miller and Lawrence of’ Arabia. …”

Lee Miller’s War by Antony Penrose and David E. Scherman

This is a very interesting collection of essays, war dispatches and photographs. Some of the images are famous and some are not. This shows yet another side of the very versatile Lee Miller, photographer, model, actress, etc. Some of the photos are fabulous and some are more mundane. This is still a good collection for the person who is interested in Miller or WW II.

Lee Miller and Roland Penrose: The Green Memories of Desire (Pegasus Series) by Katherine Slusher

For anyone interested in Lee Miller, or Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, or Roland Penrose, or the mysterious and marvelous relationship between artists who end up falling love, this book is for you. Katherine Slusher does an incredible job depicting the simpatico (and, at times, not so simpatico, yet always dynamic) shared life of Miller and Penrose, placing them among other, wellknown artistic couples like O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, Kahlo and Rivera, Mondotti and Weston, to mention a few. Slusher, who had access to the Lee Miller Archives, loads her book with wonderful pictures, some seldom seen in other publications. It’s fascinating to read the ways in which Miller and Penrose come together and apart and together and apart while making important and fundamental contributions to the world of art. Slusher’s writing is clear, well informed, and a pleasure to read.

Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life by Richard Calvocoressi

Compiled and captioned by Richard Calvocoressi (Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life is an amazing collection of memorable and visually impressive black-and-white photographs taken by the extraordinary fashion model and professional photographer Lee Miller, who began to study the craft of capturing life with a camera in Paris during 1929. A complete range of Lee Miller’s moving and inspirational photographs is presented, with each with a brief caption offering a little background on the setting and people. A significant contribution to any personal, professional, academic, or community library Photography reference collection, Lee Miller: Portraits From A Life a truly captivating, highly recommended gallery showcasing the work of a very remarkable and talented woman.

Lee Miller Photographer by Jane Livingston

Lee Miller began as one of the most in-demand fashion models of the 20′s and 30′s. A friend and lover of Man Ray, she proved to be an extremely talented and inventive photographer (with Man Ray, she invented solarization). One of the most beautiful women who ever lived, her life is fascinating and, at times, shocking. In her youth, her father used her as a subject for his own nude studies. Later on, she proved to be a sexual free spirit whose associations tended toward the promiscuous. She has been to bed with many famous men and never allowed any man to dominate her. (Not for long, anyway.) As her looks faded, she turned more and more to photography and, as World War II came along, to photo journalism. There is no hint of femininity in her war work: Her images of death and destruction are just as stark and horrifying as those of any male photographer. After the war (and perhaps because…who knows?), she gave up photography almost entirely, devoting the last part of her life to family life and travel. Like her contemporary (also a photographic genius of the first rank) George Hoyningen-Huene, Lee Miller has almost been forgotten. Luckily, like Hoyningen-Huene, she is being rediscovered and what remains of her work is being lovingly presented in fine editions like this one. Another good work is “The Lives of Lee Miller” by her son, Anthony Penrose. I regard this book as a “must have” for anyone interested in the history and development of photography.