November 13, 2013Lee Miller was well-known as a fashion model, muse and war photographer but she also was an accomplished fashion photographer, as demonstrated in The Latest Hat, which she shot in Vogue’s London studio in 1942. Top: A self-portrait from 1932. All photos © Lee Miller Archives and courtesy of The Monacelli Press
Lee Miller (1907-1977) lived a life like no other, moving from anguish to freedom, from high glamour to high achievement. Having endured a traumatic childhood — she was raped at the age of seven and infected with a venereal disease — Miller later gained fame as a superb fashion model. (Her breast was said to be the mold for the champagne glass, an honor earlier accorded to Marie Antoinette.) She became Man Ray’s assistant, muse, and lover; and she was a friend of Picasso, members of the Surrealist circle and just about everybody who was anybody. Eventually, she turned to photography herself, and during World War II she earned fame as both the preeminent fashion photographer for British Vogue and a front-line war photographer. Her life, which has been recounted elsewhere (notably by her son, Antony Penrose), still fascinates, as does her photography.
Miller’s fashion photography is less well known than her art and war photographs; a new book, Lee Miller in Fashion (The Monacelli Press) attempts to fill a gap with never-published images and others unseen since the 1940s. She learned about lighting and surrealism from Man Ray and more about photography from George Hoyningen-Huene and Edward Steichen, two pioneers of fashion photography in the 1930s. Miller was a favorite model for both, and their pictures of her are among the best in this book, with some of Miller’s own subsequent photographs recalling the classically static style and remote elegance that were hallmarks of the work of these mentors. On occasion Miller inserted humor or arresting Surrealist touches: Two of the most original pictures in this book are an art photograph of the desert and an unpublished self-portrait in which she dreamily embraces two ultra-elegant china sphinxes. Curiously, a couple of her finest fashion pictures were never published, and it is gratifying to see them here.
Left: Miller’s work for British Vogue during World War II referenced the war effort both overtly and more subtly, as in this 1944 portrait, intended to support the sale of British clothing to South America in order to yield much-needed export revenue. Right: In 1944, Miller photographed U.S. servicewomen attending a fashion show in Paris.
Unlike its American counterpart, British Vogue hardly ran any of Miller’s war photos, instead focusing on her fashion shots, such as the 1944 Petersham in Wool.
Conekin’s coverage of British Vogue during the war years is a particular revelation. In her telling, fashion become a form of resistance. British Vogue, like the government, urged women to shop with commands like, “It’s your job to spend gallantly.” It also urged them to maintain their beauty regimes to keep up their own and their soldiers’ morale. Not all of Miller’s wartime fashion photographs are wonderful, for at times she had to contend with what shortages and restrictions did to clothes. More often, she tried to inject the war into Vogue in subtle ways: a well-dressed model photographed in the ruins of the Blitz, another with baskets for a salvage drive, an unpublished picture of a woman next to a rack of military hats.
But war photography isn’t a subtle field, and when Miller went to the front, her camera turned explicit. It fell to American Vogue to publish her horrifying pictures of Buchenwald; the British version ran only one tiny picture of the concentration camp, as well as a small photograph of Miller bathing in Hitler’s bathtub. (The UK edition did print her smart, sad, startling articles about postwar Germany, however.)
And then, in the early 1950s, Miller abruptly abandoned photography and took up cooking instead. Never forgotten, she went out of fashion for a while. Stylishness seldom lasts long after all, but most of Miller’s images wear well, and this book reminds us that she could photograph both what was and was not in vogue.
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