2001 - ‘The Lives of Lee Miller’ – first Irish solo exhibition of the work of Lee Miller

Photo Museum Ireland (then Gallery of Photography) was delighted to work with Antony Penrose, son of Lee Miller and Director of the Lee Miller Archives to present ‘The Lives of Lee Miller’, the first solo exhibition of Miller’s acclaimed work (6 December 2001 – 31 January 2002). The exhibition was accompanied by a book of the same title and a talk by Antony Penrose.

The book ‘The Lives of Lee Miller’ is available to purchase now on the Photo Museum Ireland website, and in the Bookshop.

Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, NY, in 1907. Her father, an amateur photographer, introduced techniques such as the stereograph to her. In 1927, Miller appeared as a drawing on American Vogue and became sought after by the leading photographers of the era, including Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene and Arnold Genthe.

In 1929 she moved to Paris where she created many Surrealist works, including portraits, drawings, street scenes and abstractions. Images like Exploding Hand (1930) exemplifies what the founder of Surrealism, André Breton, described as ‘convulsive beauty’. She also created radical, abstract nudes, which have been described as transforming the female torso into a phallus. In the early 1930s, she acted in Jean Cocteau’s landmark Surrealist film The Blood of a Poet, and was exhibited by the gallerist Julien Levy in the ‘American Photography Retrospective’. Together with Man Ray, Miller discovered the ‘solarisation’ photographic technique, in which the image recorded is wholly or partially reversed in tone, and dark appears light and light appears dark. The technique is particularly notable in their collaboration, Eléctricité, commissioned by Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution de l’Elétricité, Paris in 1931. The Eléctricité portfolio of images also features Lee’s abstracted torso and the ‘photogram’ technique.

In 1932 Miller set up the Lee Miller Studio in New York, specialising in celebrity portraiture, fashion and advertising photography. She enjoyed a successful career photographing for American Vogue, and taking commissions for clients such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein. In 1940, Miller volunteered to cover the war effort for British Vogue, contributing to monthly fashion shoots, pattern books and knitwear features focusing on women’s safety and styling during the war period.

In 1944 Miller became a correspondent for the US Army. She was one of only a few women to cover the front-line in Europe and documented the Liberation of Paris, fighting in Luxembourg and Alsace, the Buchenwald and Dachau Concentration Camps, children dying in Vienna, peasant life in devastated post-war Hungary and Hitler’s Munich home – where the picture of Miller bathing in Hitler’s bathtub was captured. Another renowned image from this period, a quiet portrait of the Mayor of Leipzig’s daughter, shortly after the family’s collective suicide, maintains Miller’s Surrealist sensibility.