Lee Miller
Lee Miller: Portrait of a Photographer On April 23rd, 1907, Lee Miller was born in the small town of Poughkeepsie in upstate New York which is located on the Hudson River. Born to Florence and Theodore Miller, Lee was the middle child with the youngest and the oldest being both brothers. ... Lee was also exposed to her father’s amateur photography and often posed for him. It was during these very early years of Lee’s life that one event that perhaps could be linked with shaping Lee’s overall personality and genius. At the tender age of seven, a sailor son of a family friend raped Lee and left her with gonorrhea. Worried that the incident and the painful treatment of her new condition would scar her for life, Lee’s desperate parents hired a psychiatrist to convince their daughter that sex was a thing of no consequence and was unrelated to love. Perhaps this treatment being a little too successful, Lee began, at a very early age, to be promiscuous and gathered male lovers left and right. This explains Lee’s numerous affairs that she carried on with man famous artists such as Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Roland Penrose. Lee Miller, although is best known as a war photojournalist, did not start her career behind the lens. It all began while she was walking in Manhattan early in 1927; Lee was snatched to safety from the path of an oncoming car by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines. He recognized Lee as having the face of the era, her bobbed hair and headstrong personality that would symbolize the new female freedom. ... Lee turned each of these sessions into a tutorial, as she was more interested in what was going on behind the camera, and Steichen, in particular, encouraged her. In 1929, Miller and friend Tanja Ramm sailed for Paris, where she would stay for three years and produce her first body of photographic work that is considered to be her most arresting and creative work. ... At a nearby café, Miller approached Man Ray: He kind of rose up through the floor at the top of a circular staircase. ... (Livingston 29-31) Miller instantly became Man Ray’s lover and pupil. ... Miller rarely promoted or even showed her photographic work to those who might help her in her artistic career. ... Purely by accident, Miller turned on the light in her dark room after something had scurried across her foot. ... Th Paris years laid the groundwork for Lee Miller’s future life in many different ways. ... Miller met and befriended most of the influential members of the Surrealist circle in Paris. The experienced that she gained from Man Ray and the casting of Lee in Jean Cocteau’s film, Blood of the Poet, helped cement her already Surrealist views. Lee did however, objected to the way of the Surrealist belief of free love which was biased in favor of men who asserted they could have affairs whenever they wanted, but expected their women to be faithful. This belief of Miller’s drove Man Ray into a crazy jealousy of Lee and her many lovers. Her affair and infatuation with Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, had already caused the suicide of Lee’s friend and Bey’s ex-wife, Nimet, and Ray was threatening to do the same. This oppression by people who wanted to possess her rocked her already shaken view on love and ultimately drove Miller back to New York to start over and open up another studio. In 1932, during the Great Depression, Lee had established her own studio in New York against all odds and became one of the city’s foremost celebrity portrait photographers.