Tate Britain must be delighted by the popularity of their current Lee Miller photography exhibition (2 October-15 February). They also appear to have been caught off guard by it.
At least, that’s my impression. By the time I first visited, just three weeks into the exhibition’s five-month run, all framed editions of the official poster were gone. Ditto for the members’ night exclusive intro. Tickets had sold out within hours of every Miller-related tour and lecture advertised.
Miller (1907-1977), who was accustomed to being underestimated, probably would have shrugged. Smart, gorgeous, intrepid and born half a century before a woman could even have a bank account in her own name, she seized her opportunities and persevered, learning early on to make use of the way people fixated on her beauty while underestimating her talent, ambition, and grit.
When photographer Edward Steichen, who helped launch her modelling career, then inadvertently killed it by selling images of her to an advertising agency that used them to promote Kotex sanitary towels, Miller left for Paris with a letter from Steichen introducing her to Man Ray. It was the beginning of her switching positions from being the object of the camera’s gaze to being the person behind the lens.
Miller became Man Ray’s apprentice, model and lover, learning all she could from him about photography while eagerly taking on the assignments he found too quotidian. Along the way she co-created a number of Surrealist works attributed to Man Ray, made the first artistic use of ‘solarisation’ (until now credited solely to Man Ray), and was an early booster of the then-unknown Joseph Cornell. She knew everyone, taking some portraits for herself and others for Vogue of celebrities including Picasso, Colette, Charlie Chaplin, Dora Carrington, Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Joan Miró, Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Fred Astaire and Marlene Dietrich.
When Miller became one of only four women officially accredited to cover the major events of World War II, she combined fearsome forensic and aesthetic skills with exquisite darkroom technique. First as a war correspondent for the Associated Press, and then for Vogue, Miller shared her front-row view of the Blitz while documenting the vast new contributions of women to the war effort.
When Miller was sent to cover the alleged liberation of Saint-Malo, only to find the city still under heavy siege, she defied the prohibition against women correspondents in combat zones and spent nearly a week alone, documenting the violent fighting, the civilian suffering and the first recorded use of napalm (on the city’s citadel). She developed her pictures in a deserted half-destroyed pharmacy. Later, while under house arrest for defying the terms of her accreditation, she assembled the photos and wrote the text for the article she then sold to Vogue.
When the German surrender came, days later, Miller was staying in the apartment Hitler and Eva Braun had fled. There she and her Jewish colleague, David Scherman, took turns taking pictures of themselves in Hitler’s bathtub. Behind a closed area of the Tate, you can find her pictures of suicided soldiers, piles of bones and bodies, and emaciated people she and Scherman found at the liberation of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Famous as an artist, innovator, Surrealist, model, photojournalist and war correspondent in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Miller appears to have done what so many people exposed to World War II’s atrocities did when they returned to civilian life. In an era long before anyone understood what trauma was or how to treat it, she clammed up, stuck her memories in the attic (literally, trunks and trunks full of photos, footage and notes), had a family, switched interests (becoming a world-class gourmet chef) and set to work drinking herself to death, though she is officially recorded as dying of lung cancer.
With any luck, the popularity of this retrospective at the Tate — the largest exhibition of her work in the UK to date — will return Lee Miller to her rightful place as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. At this time, when truth tellers are coming back into vogue and there’s a new thirst for reliable narrators of world events, that would be a fitting conclusion.
