Lee Miller
Lee Miller Biography
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About Lee Miller
Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose, was an American photographer and photojournalist. Miller was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, becoming a fashion and fine-art photographer there.
During World War II, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Her reputation as an artist in her own right is due mostly to her son's discovery and promotion of her work as a fashion and war photographer.
In 1985, Penrose published the first biography of Miller, entitled The Lives of Lee Miller. Penrose's 1985 biography of Miller was the basis for the 2023 film by Ellen Kuras, Lee, with Kate Winslet starring as Miller. Most of the film shows Miller during World War II, depicting the occasions for some of her most well known pictures from the Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, and including a glimpse into the relationships with main characters in her life, such as her colleague photojournalist David Scherman, British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, and her husband Roland Penrose.
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Miller Fanily – Theodore Miller and Lee Miller: P0 (1928)
Lee was born into a well-to-do family in Poughkeepsie, upstate New York in 1907. Her childhood was far from idyllic – traumatic would be a better descriptor. Lee’s father Theodore, an engineer and amateur photographer, very questionably photographed her nude as a child and teenager. From this, Lee learnt how to develop film and make prints. At seven years old, Lee was raped by a friend of the family and consequently contracted gonorrhoea. Her parents warned Lee that she was not to speak about this to anyone – and she didn’t – for decades.
Lee was enrolled and expelled from several schools. At 18, she visited Paris with two chaperones, on route to finishing school in Nice, and is reported to have said:
Lee absconded from her chaperones and never arrived at finishing school, instead enjoying la vie parisienne. Lee’s father went to Paris to escort her home. Returning to the US in 1926, Lee initially studied Art in New York but found it unchallenging. Her son Antony Penrose quotes Lee as saying:
In 1927, it was rumoured that Lee deliberately walked across a road in front of a car in New York, when she recognised Condé Nast, the owner of Vogue magazine. He pulled her away from an oncoming car; Lee fainted in his arms and a few weeks later, she was on the front pages of Vogue. So began Lee’s modelling career, even before she was twenty years old. She became what we would describe today as a supermodel, so popular was Lee.
2025-10-27 12:21 🛈 ⚠
Her life as a model, photographer and war correspondent is absolutely amazing.
2024-09-06 16:06 🛈 ⚠