Well-behaved women, Lee Miller
On April 15th 1929 a beautiful blond walked into the studio of the photographer Man Ray. I am your new pupil, she said without hesitation. The famous photographer did not normally take on pupils, but he was so surprised that he didn’t argue.
The blond beauty was Lee Miller, a top model with American Vogue, who left New York at the height of her career to train as a photographer in Paris. As Man Ray’s assistant and mistress, she soon became the muse of the surrealists. The painter Pablo Picasso, the poet Paul Eluard and the film-maker Jean Cocteau all fell for her charms and she for theirs. In 1930 she looked self-confidently into Man Ray’s lens, her restless expression betraying what was to come.
She was soon bored by Parisian bohemian life and in 1932 the former top model returned to New York to open a photography studio. But that project was short-lived because two years later she married Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian businessman, and the couple moved to Cairo where Lee photographed the pyramids and the Egyptian desert. After three years, however, the charms of the desert and of the Egyptian began to wear thin and in 1937 Lee moved back to Paris where she met the English artist, historian and poet Roland Penrose.
When the Second World War broke out, Lee Miller became a war photographer for Condé Nast and Vogue. After D-Day she travelled behind the American troops and was the first to photograph the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp, an experience that never left her. Lee Miller fell prey to alcohol addiction and severe bouts of depression. She married Roland Penrose and went to live at Farley Farm House in East Sussex. Lee devoted less and less time to photography and instead became an excellent amateur cook. The house became something of an artistic mecca and Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Henry Moore and Jean Dubuffet were regular guests there. Lee Miller died of cancer in 1977 at the age of seventy. Her ashes were scattered in the garden.