Lee Miller’s career began as the model and ended as the photographer. Her life symbolizes the duality contemporary women play in art, as both muse and author– often simultaneously. While she experienced playing the two roles personally, both her modeling and photography efforts served as a muse for other artists.
Shortly after beginning her modeling career, she became the most sought after model for the great surrealists and photographers of the day. Her modeling came to a quick stop after her photograph for a Kotex pad advertisement– being the first menstrual-related ad to feature a real female figure– stirred up an outrage in the US. She left the US, with a friend, bound for Europe to study photography.
After transitioning to photography, she soon became assistant to Man Ray, while serving as his muse, model, and artistic partner, inventing the technique of solarization with him. Later, she opened her own photography studio and her photography inspired other artists to create. Graham Greene, the screenwriter of The Third Man, based his screenplay upon her photograph of a Viennese child in a hospital. Her photographs had taken a journalist approach, as she photographed the horrors of WWII for Life Magazine and Vogue, documenting holocaust victims and other remnants of the war. Her time as a photojournalist in wartime Europe wore heavy on her and she rarely spoke of it, eventually giving up photography to garden, where her ashes were finally sprinkled.
Filed under: muse, photography | Tagged: artist, Lee Miller, man ray, muse, photographer, photographer bio, surrealist
photography, painting and poetry by women is the best thing that could arrive in this world.
SENAQ