Lee Miller

Lee Miller

Did you see the documentary on Saturday night? If not, read this, then head straight to the BBC iPlayer.

Lee Miller seemed to embody so many things about photography: fashion model, nude model, photographer and surrealist, muse, war photographer. And all sorts of issues about photography, from ‘inappropriate’ images to burnout.

She was born in 1906, near New York: her father was a keen amateur photographer, and took many pictures of her. Including nudes, right through to her early twenties. In the documentary, it’s fair to say opinions of this differ: the kindest view comes from Jessie Mann, daughter of Sally Mann, who photographed her children nude – it seemed natural to them, but causes some commentators considerable disquiet.

She became a Vogue model, and then moved to Paris to study with Man Ray. She was his assistant, his model and his lover. And she emerged as a confident and capable photographer: a highly creative one, at that.

Marrying a rich Egyptian businessman, she moved to Cairo: and created beautiful images in the desert. But a colonial lifestyle didn’t suit her, so her husband bought her a ticket to Paris, where she met Roland Penrose, an English artist abroad. They became lovers – Miller was a strong woman who lived life on her own terms, always.

Living in London with Penrose when war broke out, she formed a working partnership with an American war photographer, David E Scherman: for a time, he lived with her and Penrose in London. Travelling with Scherman immediately after the Allied invasion of France, she took photographs in St Malo while it was being bombed, photographed the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, and was photographed nude in Hitler’s bath in his apartment in Munich.

It appears that the experience of war left Miller permanently damaged: she had seen things that burned into the psyche of everyone who witnessed them: but she had wanted to be there, wanted to take photographs that matter. Vogue published her images from the concentration camps, possibly influenced by Miller’s impassioned plea to the editor to do so.

She settled with Penrose in East Sussex, packing away her whole photographic life in cardboard boxes: her son, Antony Penrose, knew nothing of her careers in photography until after her death. She appears not to have had a happy old age, dying at 70, an alcoholic.

Asked, in 1969, by a New York Times reporter what drew her to photography, she said it was "a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you."

Should we regret the way that she soared so close to the sun, and paid a terrible price for being such an adventurer? Or should we celebrate a golden girl who fulfilled all her promise, and so much more? Or, and this is my choice, do both?