This photographer went from lingerie model to documenting World War II concentration camps

In a picture taken hours after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, the American photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller is in the bathtub of Hitler’s Munich residence. David Scherman, a Life photographer, snapped the shot while “an angry lieutenant of the 45th, soap in hand, beat on the locked door outside.” Miller’s combat boots caked dirt on a white rug beside the tub: grime from Dachau, the liberation of which Miller and Scherman photographed the day before.
The photograph, striking as both a historical document and a work of art, is perhaps the most famous image associated with Lee Miller. Yet its iconic status is part of a broader pattern in Miller’s life and work, which is frequently framed by her encounters with historical movements and larger-than-life figures. When used this way, context does not shine light on an artist’s achievements but threatens to eclipse them.
The Image Centre’s upcoming exhibition “Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932-1945)” aims to “change the narrative,” according to curator Gaëlle Morel. It covers a period in which Miller ran successful studios in Manhattan and Paris, worked in advertising and captured the European theatre of the Second World War as a photojournalist.
The show does not ignore her life as a pre-eminent New York model and flapper emblem, or her apprenticeship with Man Ray and work with the Surrealists. But rather than framing her as just a muse, Morel says, “we look at her as a professional photographer and independent woman who pushed photography’s boundaries.”
Biography is nonetheless important to understand an artist’s evolution. Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1907. Her father, a businessman and amateur photographer, often used her as a subject. After studying at Vassar College, she worked as a lingerie model in Manhattan. One day, she nearly stepped into the path of a car but was pulled aside by a man who turned out to be the publisher Condé Nast, who then invited her to model for Vogue.
At 19, she appeared on the magazine’s cover, becoming an in-demand model for New York’s most important photographers and publications. Edward Steichen, the eminent American photographer, encouraged Miller to learn to take pictures. After some time taking classes and practising her art, Miller moved to Paris, where she met the American artist Man Ray.
While Ray worked across almost all media, as a photographer he was known for his portraiture and fashion work. Miller became Ray’s assistant and lover. Together, they pioneered the technique of solarization, where photographic negatives are exposed to light before being developed, causing the image’s blacks and whites to reverse. It became an important method for surrealist photographers.
Before long Miller set up her own studio in Paris and became a distinguished portraitist. She photographed movie stars, royals and officials. Miller later recalled Charlie Chaplin telling her he “never had such a good time in his life as he had with what he called my surréaliste photography.” In 1932, when she was 25, Miller was included in a group show in New York by the art dealer Julien Levy, who played an important role in introducing surrealists like Salvador Dalí to America.
Miller returned to Manhattan in 1933 and opened another successful studio there. She was as skilled at commercial work as she was at fine art, publishing in Vogue and Vanity Fair, and getting a solo show at Julien Levy Gallery in 1933. Her best work came from her fusion of these two photographic languages. As her biographer Carolyn Burke observes, Miller could hit “the disquieting note of glamour mixed with dread that, in many of her best images, reflect on each other.”
In 1939, Miller moved to London with her second husband, Roland Penrose. When the German bombardment of London began the next year, she photographed the devastation for British Vogue.
Miller deployed her unique style to capture the tragedy of the destruction, the surreal image of a city in ruins and the resilience of Londoners as they began to rebuild. These photographs were collected in the book “Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire,” which was published by the British government. Miller was made head of British Vogue’s studio and her editorial work from this time explored the war’s impact on fashion.
At the end of 1942, Miller became British Vogue’s war correspondent, one of four women photographers accredited to cover the Allies’ invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Miller went to the continent in July 1944; her first article was titled “American Army Nurses Photographed and Described by Lee Miller.”
Miller was embedded with the Americans, following as they advanced through Western Europe and documenting the devastation of the war. She photographed the Battle of Saint-Malo, which saw one of the first uses of napalm in combat. In Rennes, she took “Women accused of being Nazi collaborators, 1943,” one of her greatest photographs. In it, women with shaved heads are paraded past a large crowd who jeers them. In Miller’s pictures, the war wrought not just the devastation on the battlefield but the basic breakdown of social order.
The Americans advanced to Paris and Miller was present for its liberation. She said that “the first thing I did was to go to see my old friend Picasso. Picasso always said I was the first American soldier he saw.”
In 1945, Miller covered the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. She photographed burned corpses and piles of bodies, the crematorium and all the infrastructure that made this mass murder possible. These were some of the first photographs to show the concentration camps. According to Morel, Miller immediately recognized the need to capture evidence of the camps. “She had a belief that these images were important for history.”
Miller’s experience in the war deeply traumatized her. When she returned home she continued to take pictures, but her interest in fashion waned. The early 1950s marks the moment she “stops being a professional photographer,” Morel said. She increasingly took to gourmet cooking, which she saw as “pure therapy.”
She had little interest in the past, telling one curator who wanted to put on a retrospective that most of her work had been “lost in New York, thrown away by the Germans in Paris, bombed & buried in the London Blitz (and) scrapped by Condé Nast.” In 1977, Miller died of cancer, age 70.
Her reputation has grown in recent years, thanks in no small part to the work of her son, Antony Penrose, who founded the Lee Miller Archives. A spate of books and shows has made the case for her as an important photographer.
At the Image Centre, “Lee Miller: A Photographer At Work” positions her as an artist, technician and maverick who “changed her life and her destiny.” They are introducing Lee Miller to a new audience — this time, on her own terms.
“Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932-1945)” is at the Image Centre, 33 Gould St., until Dec. 7. See theimagecentre.ca for information.