Elizabeth Lee Miller - Essay Example

Introduction Elizabeth "Lee" Miller was born on the 23rd of April 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was a successful model in the 1920s, actress,surrealist, freethinker, a Parisian fashion and fine art photographer, and World War Two photographer. Her portraits of women were often strong and heroic while those of men were often soft and lovable. She captured not only the image but the feeling of it as well. Albeit a clich, she brought the images to life and breathed the soul into each of her photographs. She described her life as "a water-soaked jig-saw puzzle, drunken bits that don't match in shape or design."1 Her eventful, exciting life would make a great movie. Though it started and ended in tragedy, it was filled with excitement and several trail-blazing firsts. "Lee Miller - The Movie" would star: Miller's interesting supportive parents, two husbands, famous WWII figures, her son who was disappointed by his alcoholic mother, celebrities, and famous artists (including Picasso) and photographers. Major scenes would include the tragic childhood sexual abuse that left her with gonorrhea, the fairytale discovery of her by photographer Conde Nast, her New York modeling career, her two marriages, her experiences photographing World War II, and the disastrous effects the war had on her that ultimately lead to her own tragic demise. The final scenes would chronicle the world's amazing "rediscovery" of Miller through her son's book and her daughter-in-law's rummaging in Miller's attic, after Miller's death in the 1970s. Childhood Lee Miller was born "Elizabeth Lee Miller" in Ploughkeepsie, New York on the 23rd of April 1907 to parents Theodor and Florence Miller. She was the middle child, with an older brother John and a younger brother Erik. Theodore Miller, her Father was an engineer and a businessman. Like many of his time Theodor was a strong believer in science and technology - going as far as to run his household scientifically.2 He had several affairs and not much is known of his relationship with his wife Florence.3 On a visit to family friends at the ages of seven Florence left Elizabeth in the care of "Uncle Bob". This short visit changed her life as, though the exact details are unclear, "Uncle Bob" raped her.4 She was rushed home, and shortly after to a doctors when it became apparent that she had contracted gonorrhea from "Uncle Bob".5 The available treatments for the disease at the time - before the discovery of antibiotics - were painful, frequent, and took many weeks.6 Elizabeth was traumatized by the rape and the subsequent treatments. To help her emotional recovery, her parents took her to a psychiatrist. This doctor taught Elizabeth that love and sex were separate things - a fact that probably contributed to her many amorous liaisons later in life.7 Theodore, an amateur photographer, quite likely thinking that he was following the doctor's directions in helping his daughter separate her physical being from her emotional one began taking nude photographs of his daughter on her eighth birthday. She soon became proud of her appearance and was a good model. The photography sessions continued until she was twenty. The family was accepting of Theodore's new hobby, treating it as art.8 The camera loved Lee Miller and so did a lot of men. She was a beautiful woman and the true definition of American beauty with her golden locks and blue eyes. She was an independent woman; a true feminist who would break all rules if they were not to her liking.9 Though outwardly she led an independent life, there was a dark side to her that she hid from the world.10 She was undoubtedly one of the most intriguing and mercurial women of the twentieth century. Beauty is central to her story: it was her passport to the glamorous and artistic worlds she plunged into between the world wars. New York Modeling Career While in Manhattan, when she was 19, her life was saved by a magazine publisher, Conde Nast, who was so impressed by her beauty that he helped launch her modeling career. She thus became a very popular and successful New York model, with her pictures being taken by most of the fashion photographers for the next two years such as: Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, Edward Steichen, and.11 There were many who sought to capture her beauty on camera. During the 1920s images of Lee Miller - sporting her trademark blonde bob - were everywhere, including frequent appearances on Vogue Magazine's cover.12 Her career as a photographer had its beginnings when she learned the craft while modeling for Edward Steichen.13 Lee left New York in 1929 due to the scandal caused by her photo appearing in a Kotex ad.14 The photo was taken by Edward Steichen, which he then sold to Kotex and which, eventually, was used in the infamous Kotex ad. This was the first time a real woman appeared in an ad for a female hygiene product.15 Like many firsts, it was viewed as scandalous and unacceptable. Though she had signed the release for the photo, she was still scandalized by her photo appearing in the ad. After the scandal had died down years later, Miller was happy to have been the one to break a taboo.16 Paris - The Beginnings of a Photography Career She was then advised by Steichen try out photography as a career instead of modeling.17 Miller planned to go to Paris, so to aid her in starting her photography career there, Steichen provided Lee with a letter of introduction to the photographer and surrealist artist Man Ray.18 So she went to Paris with a friend, a move that was the turning point in her career. Once in Paris, she declared herself to be Man Ray's pupil, who tried to discourage her by insisting that he did not take any apprentices. But later on, partly due to Miller's unnerving beauty and boldness, Man Ray accepted Lee Miller as his apprentice. Very soon after became his photography assistant, she became not only his lover, but his muse as well.19 Lee Miller and Man Ray were a highly creative and productive professional couple. They invented the Solarization - a technique by "which the image recorded on a negative or on a photographic print is wholly, or partially reversed in tone; dark areas appear light or light areas appear dark."20 Her professional and personal partnership with Ray, expanded Miller's art connections. During the 1930's she was deeply involved in the arts world in Montparnasse. By appearing in The Blood of a Poet a film by Jean Cocteau, being painted by Picasso in his Provenal wenches portraits her fame spread.21 During this time, her circle of friends included many famous names: Paul Eluard, Jean Cocteau, Alice B. Toklas, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. Her relationship with Man Ray did not last. While on a ski trip in December 1931, to Saint Moritiz, she met and was instantly attracted to a wealthy Egyptian business man - Eloui Bey.22 Bey and Miller started having an affair. Lee's decision to do so was partly due to her attraction to Bey and partly to do with pulling away from Ray who wanted her to be his wife - feelings she did not share.23 Paris to New York - A Marriage and the Lee Miller Studio In 1932, she left Man Ray as well as Paris for New York where she began her own photographic studio, alongside her brother.24 Soon after Miller became a key member of the surrealist movement.25 Whereas often surrealist images depend on manipulation and collage, Miller's depend on shrewd combination of framing and camera angle making her images ironic, which was so like her in many ways.26 Lee's clients were often well known figures and included Joseph Cornell and cast of the 1934 opera "Four Saints in Three Acts" The opera was created by Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein and featured an African-American cast.27 After their marriage in 1934, Eloui and Lee moved to Egypt. Lee gave up her professional career, but still took photographs for her own pleasure. Her photographs of the desert landscape and the pyramids during this time are now infamous in the art world. One of her desert photographs taken close to Siwa was Magritte's inspiration for his painting "Le Baiser" completed in 1938. In fact Lee's most famous "art" photograph - "A Portrait of Space".28 A Portrait of Space is an Egyptian desert landscape seen through a torn window screen - a hard shot to take due to the desert environment.29 In 1937 she had moved back to Paris for the summer as she found her life in Cairo increasingly boring, and the summers unbearably hot. She traveled with her maid - Elda - for company. In Paris she met an art collector and surrealist painter - Roland Penrose at a fancy dress ball. This wealthy Englishman would, several years later become her second husband. For Robert Penrose it was love at first sight. Two nights after meeting they slept together30(one should remember the separation that Lee had between her body and her emotions). An affair that lasted several years began then. Lee's marriage to Eloi was already shaky and by 1939 it was ending.31 World War Two Photojournalist In 1939 she moved to London and lived with Robert Penrose.32 Egypt for London shortly before World War II broke out. The US Embassy ordered Americans to return home with the start of the war in Europe, but, ever her own person Lee stayed in London. She combined her modeling connections with Vogue, and her professional photography skills to become a war photojournalist for Vogue.33 Enduring the Blitz in London,34 she took some very descriptive photographs. One of her images - Remaining Silent is a "smashed typewriter balanced on the remains of a pedestal ...speaks mutely of loss and damage"35. In 1944 Lee Miller went on assignment to the front lines of the war in Europe. Despite the fact that women were barred from the front, her daring and fearless attitude made it possible for special allowances to be made for her36 Her status as the official photojournalist for Vogue also helped her go to places where other photographers were not allowed. It was said that she could get away with anything with her charm. She took great photos of the war; not only did she capture the war itself but also the common civilians whose lives were most affected by the war.37 In 1945 she took the photograph of the daughter of the mayor of Leipzig, Germany, who committed suicide by consuming poison as the Allies approached her city. She also shot a photo of the youngest GI in the Army, Jean Perier, in Luxembourg, who was around 12 years old when Lee took this photo of him. In both these pictures, as in all others, she effectively captured the emotions as well, the haunted feel to the first picture is evident, as well as the loneliness in the second. About the second picture Lee wrote, "He didn't belong to anyone any more. His father was a prisoner and his mother had been shota short time before we liberated the town. Only one tear squeezed its way down his dirty GI face, and he smiled for my picture with an effort that would win wars."38 Partnering up with a writer for Life Magazine, Lee traveled to France in the month after D-Day. She went everywhere with the Allied forces as they advanced through Europe. If she was afraid she neither showed nor admitted it.39 Miller's war photographs and the writing that accompanied them, were graphic, poignant and moving. She stayed in Hitler's residence in Munich for a while after the war, and even was filmed taking a bath in the apartment's bathtub40 Lee photographed a suffering child in a Vienna Hospital who was sick after receiving black market pharmaceuticals during the war. Graham Greene was so influenced by this photo that he based his screenplay, "The Third Man" on it.41 She shot the World War II scenes as an official U.S. Army and U.S. Air Corps photographer, including photos of the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald which revealed so much to the world and how brutal these camps were.42 "She wanted people to see how amazingly a fashion magazine like Vogue could publish something so brutal"43 commented Haworth-Booth of Miller's passionately written Vogue article "Germans are Like Us". The article was written from Lee's experiences when she had revisited during the liberation of Paris. The war did take its toll on Miller. She was angry like everyone else of what the war had done to the world, how it tore down family and friends and the whole of the society. In her photo of the dying child in Vienna, you can feel the anger that she felt for the dying, dead and the suffering survivors. She took the war too close and personal, and it made her furious inside causing her great pain and sadness, something most war journalists, especially photojournalists, are well acquainted with. As the war dispersed and died away, it took with it Miller's beauty and radiance.44 Lee returned to Paris depressed, exhausted, and confused about the direction where her life was headed. She traveled both on assignment to Denmark and Hungry, and to visit Man Ray in California with Robert.45 She was as whole as one can ever be on the outside but scattered and broken on the inside. In her years after she has put down her cameras for good, she closed up herself and would not open up to love and comfort even if it would cost her much greater in the end. Motherhood and a Second Marriage At thirty-nine years old, while waiting to have an appointment for a story with the Swiss president confirmed, Lee had something else quite unexpected confirmed - she was pregnant.46 She was not ready to be a mother and after the death and tragedies of the war, and she was more involved in her life and work than in her son's raising. He was raised by a succession of nannies - the longest staying one Patsy Murray became his de facto mother.47 This combined with Lee's later addictions and on going depressions lead to a detached relationship between mother and son. Shortly after learning of her pregnancy, Lee traveled back to London to divorce Bey, divorced Bey, from whom she was already estranged, in a Muslim divorce ceremony.48 On May 3, 1947 married Penrose at the Hampstead Registry Office49. She kept working for Vogue for the next two years and then stowed away her cameras, determined to venture into a new career as a homemaker. Although she was not the maternal type and peacetime in the countryside was boring for her, she and husband Penrose bought Farley Farm House in Sussex.50 Farley Farm became a place for visiting artists including Picasso and Man Ray. By this time Lee had given up photography with the exception of taking pictures of visitors off and on51. Lee's Ghosts of War Lee rarely talked about her war experiences and perhaps like all of the people who had been up-close and personal with the war, it was much too painful for her to relive the events that occurred and the scenes that had flashed before her eyes.52 Perhaps her exploits had resulted in connecting her to the devastation that had occurred in a macabre sort of way. Her fearless attitude was perhaps a front for her deeply emotional involvement with the subjects of her photographs, something that took its toll on her during her silent and peaceful countryside life. At home, after putting away her camera for good, she studied to be a gourmet cook and posed as the typical housewife. Unbeknownst to others, upstairs in the attic were bits and pieces she had accumulated during her time as a war correspondent - including silver from Hitler's apartment,53 a gunner's binoculars, and her journalist uniform. In this box of old things was her old life as well. She grew tired and life gradually escaped her body as well. Her spirit was bound to these things that has been kept to wither away also taking away her vigor and character. Though till the very end she maintained her ironic and witty character. She did not live a perfect life though she seemed like royalty; her life may not have been a hard struggle as she always had enough due to her modeling and photography career and she also married a wealthy Egyptian.54 However, money was not enough for her to lead a happy life; she was not aware of how to love. Perhaps she did not know exactly what it meant. Maybe it was due to a childhood trauma that ended up giving her a fairly warped sense of love.55 Although she was a surrealist viewing things that we often have to struggle to see, she was not aware of how to view her own life. Lee Miller was ever a determined person who never thought of giving up, though she did know when to roll up the mat and admit that some things had to be pulled down no matter what. She was a woman of idea and courage beyond any one. Although she did not take up any apprentices in later years, or shared her talent so to speak, she was open-minded and always took chances on new adventures56. The posttraumatic stress that she suffered acutely from the war lead to self-destructive behavior such as alcoholism, smoking and pervasive depression57. Her doctor callously commented that the world couldn't keep a war going just for the sake of Lee Miller's work. But she never found her footing again, either as an artist or a muse. 58 Miller made little to no effort to promote her existing work. Roland's lack of effort on that issue mirrored Lee's own did nothing to show the world Miller's works, perhaps because he did not want to force her to do something she didn't want to do, or maybe, some contend, because he was somewhat jealous of her talent.59 She died in 1977 at Farley Farm House, from cancer. Her body was cremated, with the ashes spread through her herb garden.60 Son's Book To Antony Penrose, her only child, she was just a "drunk" and an embittered soul who embarrassed him most of the time with her frank and uncomfortable remarks and comments. Antony's wife Suzanna who came across some notebooks while rummaging through her attic and showed those to her husband.61 It was that discovery and a trip to visit his mother's brothers that Antony came to know of the other life her mother lived; these were his mother's notes about the war and her childhood trauma. Later he asked an interviewer: "Can you imagine living with a person, being married to a person, and not knowing that she'd been raped at the age of seven She kept that kind of thing in water tight compartments; nobody knew."62 Not only her notebooks, but Miller's prints and negatives were also found in that dusty old attic.63 It is due to his efforts of hiring specialists to study, and conserve, the papers and artifacts and his own in publicizing his mother's work since the early 1980's that we have come to know Miller as she truly was meant to be known.64 He also wrote a book, which showed the love for the mother he only came to know after her death.65 Antony wrote about Lee's trouble loving anyone due to the fact that as a child she was raped by "Uncle Bob", and the traumatic (now archaic) treatment for the gonorrhea she contracted from the "family friend".66 Anthony's book entitled The Lives of Lee Miller was published by Rinehart and Winston in 1985. CONCLUSION Elizabeth Lee Miller - The Movie would be a box office success if (or when) it is ever made into a movie. Her eventful, exciting life would make a great movie. Though it started and ended in tragedy, it was filled with excitement and several trail-blazing firsts. Key characters include: Miller's interesting supportive parents, two husbands, famous WWII figures (including a scene with Lee taking a bath in Hitler's bathtub), celebrities, and famous artists, like Picasso and photographers. The dazzling life of a 1920s fashion model and the exciting and dramatic world of a photographer in the Egyptian desert and the Blitz and the front lines in World War Two, would be a riveting storyline. Her many romantic affairs and her two husbands would provide plenty of roles for talented actors to play. The final scenes would chronicle the world's amazing "rediscovery" of Miller through her son's book and her daughter-in-law's rummaging in Miller's attic, after Miller's death in the 1970s. Indeed, Elizabeth Lee Miller - The Movie would be a gripping success, as her life ultimately was. Bibliography "Biography" Lee Miller Archives. 2008 (accessed May 07, 2008) Burke, Carolyn. Lee Miller: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005 Calvocoressi, Richard. Lee Miller: Portraits from A Life. Thames and Hudson, 2005. "Double Exposure: Bermuda National Gallery and ACE Gallery focus on photographer Lee Miller" Bermuda National Gallery May 05, 2003. http://www.bermudanationalgallery.com/docs/PR-Miller.pdf (accessed May 07, 2008) Giovanni, Janine "What's a Girl to do When a Battle Lands in Her Lap" New York Times. October 21, 2007 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.htmlres=990CE6DA1E3DF932A15753C1A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1 (accessed May 07, 2008) Livingston, Jane. Lee Miller Photographer. California: International Arts Foundation, 1989. "Lee Miller" Wikipedia 3 May 2008 (accessed May 07, 2008) "Lee Miller Biography" Lenin Imports (accessed May 06, 2007) MacWeeney, Alen. The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and Their Circle at Farley Farm. London: Rowman Littlefield, 2001. McGuigan, Cathleen "A Model Photographer" Newsweek Feb 4, 2008 (accessed May 07, 2008) Penrose, Roland. Roland Penrose & Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2008. Schappell, Elissa. "Look at Me" New York Times. January 8, 2006 (Accessed May 07, 2008) "Solarisation" Wikipedia May 07, 2008 (accessed May 08, 2008) Read More