Lest Lee Forget
This is an accidental Big Day. Accidental because its subject, Lee Miller – one of the most important war photographers of the 20th century – was unknown to me a week ago. But our excellent local art gallery, the Polygon, had just opened a big show of her work. The keeper of the Lee Miller archives in Sussex had flown in to give a tour of the exhibit. Jen had bagged tickets for herself and a plus-one. Me? Yes! Seemed a fitting way to mark Remembrance Day. And a fascinating person to build a Big Day around.
On y va.
The exhibition
The room is so packed you have to stand on tiptoes to see our petite guide in the throng. She is Ami Bouhassane, steward of the private Lee Miller archive and – the real draw for many here – Lee Miller’s granddaughter. So you feel like you’re getting pretty solid intel about this cultural figure whose myth only deepens the more we learn about her.
It doesn’t seem possible that Lee Miller was just one person. Her son Antony Penrose got it right when he called his biographer of his mother The Lives of Lee Miller. Lives, plural.
For the next hour Ami gives us a lively tour through the exhibition, past fashion photos and display cases containing letters to friends and lovers and professional colleagues – all boldface names from the beau monde and the avant-garde art scene of the coolest cities in the world.
We learn that each new phase of Lee’s life was set in motion by some unbelievable co-incidence.
Her high-school theatre teacher in Poughkeepsie takes a shine to her and pulls strings to get her into a year-long program studying stagecraft in Paris, where she makes invaluable connections.
Upon her return to New York, she absent-mindedly steps out into traffic; a passerby grabs her and saves her life. The dapper stranger is none other than Condé Nast (a real person!), who takes one look at that face and offers her a modeling job. Within a year she’s on the cover of Vogue.
Next swerve: Bad luck! An agency sells her image to a sanitary-napkin company. Americans find the association icky and her Stateside modeling career is dead. (“Nobody wanted anything to do with the Kotex girl,” Ami says.) But this proves a blessing, as it forces Miller to return to Paris (where they’re more grown-up about that stuff). Her modeling career soars AND she’s introduced to Man Ray, to whom she apprentices herself (in more ways than one). And her Second Act as a fashion photographer is underway. Soon she is gallivanting with Surrealist highballers – Picasso, Magritte, Cocteau – plus a Quaker who paints himself blue (and will ultimately marry Miller ); this is Ami’s grandfather, Roland Penrose.
The final twist lands her the role for which she’s now best known: a top-line photojournalist. After shooting some b-roll of the liberation of Paris, and field-hospital casualties in Normandy, Miller finds herself in the seaside town of Saint-Malo. It’s supposed to be a “safe zone,” newly liberated. Turns out that’s not true. The Germans are still there, dug in, and when the US 83rd infantry division shows up a furious firefight erupts. Miller is the only journalist there to document the mayhem. Suddenly she’s a trusted war correspondent. Which sets up the moment she was born for.
There’s an expression that describes people with insiders’ cred: they “know where the bodies are buried.” With Lee Miller that was literally true. She was first on the scene at the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. The nightmarish scene she captured, when the photos were published in Vogue, brought the terrible truth home to a shocked British and American public.
The headline over her photo spread: “Believe it.”
Ami doesn’t follow us into the last room of the Polygon, where Miller’s contact sheets from Dachau are on display. Thirty five train cars packed with bodies. Skeletal prisoners standing stunned and hollow in their striped garb, dwarfed by towering piles of bones from the crematorium. I have to stop looking at this and duck onto the balcony for some air.
The podcast
On the way out of the gallery Jen runs into a work colleague. He mentions he’d just caught a fascinating episode on Miller by the two British blokes who do the The Rest is History podcast.
Back home, we give it a listen, and pick up some more tidbits.
We learn more about her shotgun wedding to a wealthy Egyptian air-conditioning magnate who squired her off to Cairo for three years, where she noodled around taking chemistry classes and shooting landscape photos in the desert – yet another life! (Miller would ultimately cool on the A/C tycoon.) There’s unsettling detail about childhood abuse at the hands of a family friend when she was seven years old – an underlayer of trauma that may help explain elements of her personality, like her carnivorous promiscuity. What’s wild is that Miller’s Third Act as a serious photojournalist – the only female combat photographer to follow the Allied advance across France and into Germany – wasn’t widely known. She got very little attention for that work. She never talked about it. Even her own son didn’t learn about it until the 1980s, when he found a stash of her wartime photos in the attic.
But that treasure trove became the basis of Antony’s 1985 biography, and that eventually seeded a flashy Hollywood biopic released two years ago.
The podcast guys talked up the movie like it was the best thing since The Godfather. So of course we had to watch it.
The film
Does Kate Winslet look like Lee Miller? Kind of?
No matter. She’s decent in the role but tied up by a graceless script, which fails to reveal much at all about what makes her tick. (And the leaden writing doesn’t help.)
Verdict: film looks great, doesn’t quite land. It becomes clear that the podcast guys’ enthusiasm for the movie likely had something to do with fact that the episode was sponsored by the film’s production company.
I do like what Winslet has to say about her motivation for getting the thing done, though. “If I hadn’t made this film,” she told a reporter on the press tour, “I feared Lee would never be defined, for history, on her own terms – as a middle-aged woman who went to war. She had been defined by the male gaze.”
The reportage
At one point the film, a fellow war reporter, played by Andy Samberg (of all people), reads a draft of one of Miller’s pieces and says, “You’re really starting to get the hang of it.”
No kidding. Miller claimed to hate writing – loved taking pictures, hated writing – but her writing may actually be the one place where her personality blooms. Her immersion in high society had made her worldly, and her commitment to the Bohemian art scene of the roaring ‘20s primed her to see poetry in the mundane (“…the sea and sky joined up in a careless watercolor stroke…”). Her life experience had made her nervy. On the page she went for it. Here she is trying to explain folks who saw what was happening and yet did nothing to stop it:
“Rich retired villa-owners, conservative boardinghouse-keepers, middle-class successful, tenacious bond-owners, had interest in supporting a party which promised them security. The type of person who clips his share coupons or reads the ticker tape for marketing profits without asking if the mine is a swindle or the dividends drawn from capital lived here. They bought Hitler on the same terms and are very shocked to find themselves the ‘widows and orphans’ of a bucket-shop scheme. They expect sympathy from us for having been accomplices of crooks and receivers of stolen goods.”
Miller’s reportage on the siege of Saint. Malo, for British Vogue, is fantastically assured. It sounds like music.
“There was a great black explosion where the most forward men had been a minute before. Cezenne was firing on her sister fortress … shells which could not penetrate or injure the occupants but would blast out our men, who were oozing down the escarpment and sliding down the path which they had so painfully climbed. Other bursts from Cezembre swept the sides of the fort. … our mortar fire was peppering the pillboxes to keep them silent…
Hemingway would have approved. (No doubt he did approve – he and Miller knew each other pretty well.)
The outshot
So what does it all add up to, the international woman of mystery and all she accomplished, and how the world has handled her legacy?
“At least back then people could believe what they saw in a photograph, even if they didn’t want to believe it,” Jen observed. “Now, with AI and Photoshop and whatnot, you just never know if what you’re seeing is the truth.”
Makes you wonder: What is the role of a photojournalist now?
