Model. Surrealist. Photographer. World War II correspondent. Lee Miller’s life reads like a masterclass in living several different lives in one lifetime. “She was the nearest thing I knew to a mid-20th century Renaissance woman,” said fellow World War II photojournalist David E Scherman. Perhaps her most remarkable work is from her time as a World War II photojournalist and correspondent, documenting women’s war effort in Britain, the Siege of St Malo, the Alsace Campaign and the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.
A fractured childhood
Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller was born on 23 April 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, to Florence and Theodore Miller. Growing up on a farm provided near endless possibilities for adventure and Theodore, a mechanical engineer, would treat Lee the same as her two brothers, encouraging their shared interests in science and machinery. Lee’s favourite toy was a chemistry set, and she was soon introduced to photography when her father installed a darkroom in a cupboard underneath the stairs. Yet Lee’s childhood was to end abruptly. At the age of seven she was sexually assaulted, by a family acquaintance. The trauma was to be further aggravated, as the perpetrator infected Lee with gonorrhoea – a venereal disease for which the medical treatment at the time consisted of numerous acid irrigations, administered daily for a year. “It changed her whole life and attitude,” her brother, the aviation pioneer John Miller, recalled years later. “She went wild.”
At home, Lee would immerse herself in her own projects with total dedication, yet at school she refused to submit to authority and in her teenage years proceeded to get expelled from every school in which she was enrolled. In an attempt to salvage the situation, Lee’s parents arranged a trip to Paris. While the time in the French
