Customer Reviews

The Art of Lee Miller

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It is little wonder that an earlier work on this artist was entitled "The Lives of Lee Miller" since she seems to have packed the living of more than one extraordinary life into her own.

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York 1907. Her father, a keen amateur, photographed her constantly as she was growing up and familiarised her with some of the technical aspects of the art. Serendipity then played a part in what followed as, when crossing a Manhattan street she was `discovered' at 19 by magazine publisher Condé Nast and a modelling career followed. Moving to Paris(1929)she became the assistant, lover, muse and finally a collaborator of Man Ray, also putting in an appearance as a `living statue' in Cocteau's "The Blood of a Poet"(1930) and was a significant figure in the surrealist movement.
She returned to New York in 1932 and established a portrait gallery only to marry and moved to Egypt a couple of years later. Although not working as a photographer during this period she took some of her most arresting images.
In 1937 she returned to Paris and by the outbreak of the Second World War was living in London, beginning the most remarkable phase of her professional life. As a photojournalist she documented the Blitz before becoming the only female photographer to travel with the troops across Europe in the immediate aftermath of D-Day. As well as the liberation of Paris she saw and photographed the horrors of the concentration camps.

Drained by her wartime experiences she essentially retired to a `normal' life in Sussex, before her death in 1977.

This book collects images from all periods of the artist's life and many of the images are by others, either featuring her as a model or as being of influence or importance to the artist's work. I was impressed by the range and quality of Lee Miller's own work, particularly the pre-war pictures, many of which are truly striking. I was already familiar with many, but not all, of the wartime images from the earlier "Lee Miller's War". If it is the wartime images you are interested in it is probably the better buy and I would trade its introduction by David E. Scherman for all the text in this book.
As I mentioned earlier many of the photographs are, of course, of her by others and it is fascinating to see the way she switches from one side of the camera to the other.

The text is well written and insightful, but can be a little dry and scholarly, concentrating its attention very much on the work rather than her life, as a biography "Lee Miller: A Life" would be better here. If there is a criticism to be made, it is that, because for much of her career she was working within constraints placed upon her by her various paymasters/editors a good deal of the material presented is of the more commercial/mundane variety. This, while a significant part of her working life, is given too much weight in the text, and presumably, reproduced at the expense of some of the more interesting images that are occasionally referred to in the text but not displayed.

The book is a good size, the pictures are well reproduced and all the most famous images are here as well as some very striking newer ones. Whether as an introduction to the `lives' of Lee Miller or as an extension to an existing collection this is an excellent work.

While vacationing in San Francisco last year, I was fortunate to view a showing of Lee Miller's work at the Museum of Modern Art. Never having heard of this photographer prior to, I was blown away. Her images have remained in my mind, and I wanted to recapture what I fell in love with last year. The book does just that and more.

Fascinating study of an interesting woman. I have noticed that a number of books I have read on talented women artists try to give credit to the men in their lives. This is no exception. I do, however, feel her work speaks for itself. Her story is very interesting as is her photography.