Lee Miller
Lee Miller
I don't know why, many well-known pioneer women in the early 20th century had a tragic childhood, and so did Lee Miller.
She was raped by a so-called "family friend" when she was 7 years old and contracted an illness. Gonorrhea was a terminal illness in the early 20th century, and a 7-year-old girl, accompanied by her mother, went to the hospital every week to receive disinfection and rinsing treatment. She was raised to be watched with "sympathy" and had to endure the strange eyes of the people around her almost every day.
Growing up, Lee Miller became an imaginative woman with an angelic appearance, but she did the most daring and out-of-the-ordinary things of women of her time.
01
Deformed family
Family
Lee Miller
Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, and her name at the time of her baptism was Elizabeth Miller. The family was an ordinary, wealthy American middle-class home with three children, two boys and one woman, the father, Theodore Miller, a mechanical engineer whose hobby was photography; and his mother, a Canadian, was a nurse by profession.
Lee Miller with her father
I have to say that this seemingly ordinary middle-class family actually has a lot of weirdness. Miller was raped by a "family friend" at the age of 7, but no one was convicted; Miller's brother, named John, was a transvestite; Miller's mother, who had attempted suicide in her car; and after Miller was raped, her father Theodore's treatment was to take nude photos of her daughter...
"I'm going to treat my daughter's shame in this way." Theodore explained his actions this way. But isn't it a little too strange that this kind of shooting continues until the daughter is in her 20s?
Lee Miller with her mother
Growing up in such an eccentric family, Lee Miller was destined not to become an ordinary, normal girl. She was expelled from every school she attended, but Lee Miller didn't care, and when she was described by the school as "an idle student and an active rebel," she simply shrugged and left the school for another. Because of her experience, Miller was destined to be an outlier in this world, and she was not willing to bother to put on a warm and pulsating coat.
Lee Miller wrote in his diary: "I will not talk about my dark side, but also about the terrible past. I would say to people: Almost everything you hear about me is true. ”
02
Model, photographer
Photographer
Lee Miller
At the age of 17, Lee Miller persuaded her father to send her to a theater in Paris to study lighting and set design for seven months. But soon she lost interest in the theater industry and returned to the United States to study painting at the New York Art Students Union.
One day after class, Miller was walking down the street when she was nearly hit by a speeding car. At this time, the business tycoon Conte Montrose Nass happened to pass by, pulled her aside, and came to a hero to save the United States.
Lee Miller
Lee Miller
Lee Miller
If Miller was just a mediocre looking man, perhaps a word of thanks could end the accident. But she is a beautiful child with an angelic face and a devil's figure. Conte brought Miller into Vogue, making her a professional model. Because her photographs were so expressive, Miller was on the cover of Vogue's American and British editions the following year.
Famous photographers scrambled to photograph her, with bewildered eyes, melancholy temperament, sensitivity to the lens and beautiful body language. But Miller doesn't want to be a model, she doesn't want to be framed in the camera, she wants to be the master of the camera.
Lee Miller
Photographer Stetchin regards Miller as his muse, and he supports any of Miller's ideas, even doing everything he can to help her get the contact information of the famous photographer, the surreal master of art Man Ray. Without hesitation, Lee Miller gave up his modeling career in New York and went alone to Paris in search of Master Man Ray.
Man Ray and the Negative Phenomenon
At this time, Man Ray was in a relationship with Gigi of Montparnasse, who was his model and his muse. But after meeting Miller, Man Ray broke his vow not to take an apprenticeship and made Miller his model and assistant. The two women quietly clashed several times, with Gigi losing and leaving Man Ray's apartment with his luggage, while Lee Miller officially became Man Ray's student, lover, and new muse.
Lee Miller and Man Ray
Miller learned superb photography skills from Man Ray, and they mastered a new technique: the "halfway exposure method" that stunned the history of 20th-century photography, and Miller even took the initiative to complete most of the fashion photography work in order to let Man Ray focus on artistic creation. For three years, wherever Man Ray went, Miller followed, and they lived sweetly together for three years. However, the relationship ended quickly, and rumors were that Lee Miller was entangled with a group of artists, making Man Ray hate and love. Man Ray said in his letter, "I hate myself for both admiring you and being miserable. ”
Lee Miller and Man Ray
After an argument, Miller left Man Ray to return to New York, where she and her brother Eric opened a photography studio specializing in portrait and commercial photography. Miller completed a gorgeous turn, transforming from a model in front of the camera to an artist who created behind the camera.
03
Marriage and lover
Marriage
Lee Miller
Two years after the studio opened, Lee Miller grew tired of it again, married Aziz Eloy Bay, a prominent family in Cairo, and moved to Cairo. The marriage was financially wealthy, and Aziz was an Egyptian railway tycoon and very wealthy. But from a spiritual point of view, it was so barren, so barren that Miller soon frantically struggled out of this life. She walked out of the mansion and walked around Egypt to photograph the desert, the pyramids, the skies, the villages, the ruins, the monasteries on the edge of the desert. Her masterpiece Portrait of Space, shot near Siwa in Egypt's western desert, is a surrealist photograph that can be said to be Miller's masterpiece in his first marriage.
Portrait of Space
Fast forward to 1937, and Lee Miller couldn't wait to leave Egypt for Paris to meet the British surrealist painter Roland Penrose, who soon fell in love with the talented painter and traveled with him throughOut Europe. She fell in love, left her husband to live with Penrose, and in 939 Lee Miller even moved to London to live with Roland Penrose.
From the top of the Great Pyramid, 1937, Egypt
Oasis Village, 1936, Egypt
04
War photographer
War Photographer
Lee Miller
Lee Miller's life as an artist was shattered by the Blitzkrieg of the German raids on London. Refusing to follow her parents' advice and immediately returning to the United States, she decided to start working for Vogue in the United Kingdom, becoming a photographer and writer for the magazine. She took on various photographic tasks for the magazine every day against the rumbling of gunfire, whether it was portrait photography or fashion photography. During this particular period, Miller even began documentary-style photography.
Anna Lesca (female pilot) White Waltham Airport, United Kingdom, 1942
In 1944, Miller flew to France as a Vogue-certified war correspondent, where she participated in the Normandy Landings with U.S. troops, witnessing the Siege of St. Malo, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of Luxembourg-Arces, the confluence of U.S. and Russian forces at Torgau, and the dissolution of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.
Lee Miller's war press card
She was the only female photographer to cover the European battlefields of World War II, leaving behind plenty of evidence of Nazi atrocities committed in refugee camps.
Battlefield photography
Battlefield photography
Among these photos, a photograph taken by someone else became a classic. After Hitler committed suicide, Miller was one of the first photographers to be allowed to enter Hitler's residence in Munich. Here she took off her military uniform and went into Hitler's bathtub to take a shower. Life magazine's David De Hillman took a picture of her: a pair of dusty boots on a bath mat, and a picture of Hitler on the left side of the bathtub, centered on Miller, who was carelessly grooming her hair and seemingly unconcerned about her surroundings. After the photo was revealed, many people thought it was a showmanship, but Miller's son Anthony felt that his mother must have liked the photo, because it was like a warrior who had defeated a demon and washed away his body full of dust and tiredness.
Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub
After the end of World War II, Miller did not stop her realistic photography, she filmed a series of works exposing the trauma of war, such as: girls in the ruins, the death of children in Vienna, survivors with withered faces and scattered spirits, children displaced in Hungary after the war... She subverted the tradition of men in charge of the camera, showing the world from a female perspective the devastation that war had brought to the world.
A French woman is accused of working with Germans to shave her hair, France, 1944
Homeless Children in Budapest, Hungary, 1946
Children on the Streets of Luxembourg, 1944
05
The wounds of war endure
War Trauma
Lee Miller with son Anthony
After the war, Lee Miller returned to London to continue his pre-war work. Photograph celebrities and celebrities and show their glamorous side on the cover of a fashion magazine. But she could not find back her former enthusiasm for work in any way, she saw too many things in the war, those flesh and blood corpses, those who had tried to survive but could only die in anticipation, those who had empty eyes of conservative torture... Sensitive Miller suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and she could no longer pick up the camera and had no inspiration, so she chose to put the camera on the shelf.
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose
In 1947, Miller divorced her husband, a wealthy Egyptian businessman, married Roland Penrose, and gave birth to her only son, Anthony Penrose, the same year.
In the years that followed, she struggled with depression. In order to alleviate her mental panic, she drank heavily, smoked, and never mentioned photography. Anyone who tried to interview her, she refused. She completely excluded photography from her own life and bought a Farley farm in East Sussex with her husband, where she farmed and raised chickens and ducks.
Lee Miller with family and friends
Lee Miller had become fat, and time had carved deep lines into her face, and she was no longer the beautiful woman in the magazine, but a depressed and tired middle-aged woman. Thankfully, she didn't give up on life, she learned to cook, created her own appetizing sandwich, and won the first prize in the Norwegian Food Competition. In the mouths of Miller's son, Anthony, the mother is portrayed as follows: "People thought she [Lee Miller] was a woman wearing a helmet and whistling across the Continent. And my dad and I took pictures of her, documenting her differently, in an apron in the kitchen, stirring the food in the pot. ”
Picasso's Lee Miller
Picasso's Lee Miller
For the rest of Miller's life, she stopped touching photography and even hid the negatives she had shot, and the outside world gradually forgot about this great female photographer.
In 1977, Miller died of lung cancer at the age of 70.
Lee Miller
From fashion models, to photography apprentices, to New York fashion photographers, then to the wives of wealthy Egyptian merchants, war photojournalists, painter wives, to peasant wives in the countryside, to gourmet chefs... Miller's every turn was gorgeous. The woman who has been through the complexity has never given up on herself, and she has been struggling to move forward. You say that photographers are men and women can only be models, so I'll show you. While she has always been a controversial character, Miller refuses to be bound by traditional cognition, is maverick and firmly expresses herself. The spirit of defying power, going one's own way, even if you are in hell, you must strive to climb up is worthy of reflection by each of us.
Lee Miller
Miller once wrote in his diary: "I have never wasted my life, not even a minute." If I could live again, I would like to be a more free person, whether it is thoughts, bodies, or feelings. One veteran art critic put it this way: "Lee Miller's career, whether fortunate or unfortunate, will be passed on for its astonishing beauty." ”