For many artists, there comes a moment when, through the unexpected confluence of circumstances, a unique pitch of creativity is achieved. Neither the causes nor consequences of that moment can be anticipated and, once passed, it is unlikely to be rediscovered.
For photographer Lee Miller, the moment came towards the close of the second World War when, through a blend of chance and calculation, she found herself accompanying the US armed forces across western Europe.
Many of Miller's images from that journey - during which she took a dip in Hitler's bath, was among the first observers to enter Dachau concentration camp and covered post-liberation Paris's 1944 haute couture fashion shows - have since attained iconic status, as also has the woman who took them. Yet a couple of years later, she all but abandoned photography and for the best part of three decades allowed herself to become a marginal figure in the medium to which she had given so much.
Miller's active period during the war started relatively late, since for much of the time she remained in London, taking pictures of Britain's bombed capital, which were reproduced in American Vogue. She later recalled that the magazine's editor, Edna Chase, had sent a horrified memo observing that members of staff in England were wearing neither hats nor stockings; on being informed that the latter were no longer available in London, Chase arranged for everyone in the Vogue office to be sent three pairs. The same publication would also later carry some of Miller's most shocking pictures from Europe: photographs of dead German soldiers lying on the roadside; shots of skeletal Jewish concentration camp internees; views of Brittany being laid waste by allied bombing. No doubt Vogue was a strange outlet for this work, but as the magazine's British editor observed, Miller's contribution was "the most exciting journalistic experience of my war. We were the last people one could conceive having this type of article, it seemed so incongruous in our pages of glossy fashion".
In large measure, the incongruity arose from Miller's own circumstances and career prior to the outbreak of the war. Born in 1907, the daughter of an affluent US businessman, she discovered photography through her father's interest in the medium; he had a small darkroom installed in the family home and would regularly take pictures of his daughter.
As a young woman, Lee Miller was exceptionally photogenic and became a successful model first in New York and then in Paris. But she always wanted to take photographs rather than just be seen in them, and soon after settling in France in 1929, she sought out Man Ray, becoming both his student and lover. During the couple's three years together, Miller refined her professional skills and helped Man Ray to develop his solarisation technique, which gives sections of a photograph the character of a negative print. She also came to know many of the artists then working in Paris, such as Jean Cocteau, for whom she played the female lead in his 1930 film Le sang d'un poΦte, and Picasso, who later painted her portrait.
Lee Miller's professional career might have followed a different trajectory but for a number of interventions, one of which was the course of her personal life. A powerful physical allure meant that many men were drawn to her, and she responded to their attentions with easy assurance. In 1934, she was married for the first time, to an Egyptian businessman called Aziz Eloui Bey; and, as a result, spent much of the next couple of years playing the role of wife in the Middle East. It was a part for which Miller was unsuited, and she was soon travelling with other lovers, including the Englishman who would become her second husband, Roland Penrose.
Personal distractions aside, Miller's photographic work was somewhat restricted by the nature of her contacts within the publishing world. Because she had been a model and had worked with the likes of George Hoyningen-Huene and Horst P Horst, she naturally tended to be offered work by the same outlets as themselves: fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Looking at the photojournalism she would produce during the war, it quickly becomes obvious that fashion pictures were not really to Miller's taste, although she was never less than competent in this field. She responded better to portraiture and, while living in New York for a relatively short period during the early 1930s, before her first marriage, produced some powerful images of contemporary artists, such as composer Virgil Thomson and actress Gertrude Lawrence.
More than had ever been the case before, the war offered an outlet for Miller's energy and challenged her creative abilities. Required to respond constantly to rapidly-changing environments, she also had to keep the needs of her eventual audience in mind - as well as keeping herself out of danger. When the war concluded, she tried to find alternative stimulation of equal measure, travelling through eastern Europe as it fell under Soviet authority. "It's my damned itchy feet," she wrote to a friend at the time, "they just won't let me stop moving."
Eventually, though, she was forced to stop both by exhaustion and by having nowhere left to go, except back to Roland Penrose in England. Penrose, scion of a wealthy Quaker family, had been one of the great champions of Surrealism during the 1930s and had amassed a substantial collection of art from the first half of the 20th century. After the couple's marriage in 1947, they lived between London and Sussex, but neither place satisfied Miller, who sank into an unhappiness from which she never entirely escaped. For a time in the 1950s, she seemed threatened by alcoholism, brought on by misery over the loss of her good looks and boredom with her affluent surroundings. "We cannot keep the world permanently at war just to provide you with excitement," commented her doctor. Nevertheless, having experienced so much excitement, Miller could not comfortably settle, and while in old age she found distraction in cooking, this could hardly be regarded as a satisfactory alternative to what had gone before. A few months after her 70th birthday, she died from cancer in 1977.
The Lives of Lee Miller is at the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, until January 31st. Miller's son, Antony Penrose, will present a free illustrated talk, Lee Miller: Muse and Surrealist Artist, today in the gallery at 1.15 p.m.
