Biography Lee Miller, the beauty of chaos

Lee Miller, The Beauty of Chaos April 23, 1907 - July 21, 1977

“Listen to me Anthony…I've never been a mother, but have I really been a woman? I was only a surrealist, a being divided by life, who lived with what she transmitted to me. Images of all facets of the human being. »

He casts a tender gaze on this woman, whom he never felt was his mother, on her aged face, but whose beauty remains palpable in this still soft worn skin, with perfect features, a threadbare statue.

“It's life that made me what I am, or what I wasn't. My childhood, my youth, have never been. I was called pretty, very pretty, and right away it was just that image, used by others. Dad first of all, Théodore, a great sense of photography, had no passion but to photograph me naked, me and my friends… without any embarrassment of my modesty which was quickly ousted, reduced to an image. When I was 7 years old, I was no longer a little girl, my innocence swept away by the gratified desires of a man, I don't even know who, who used my body like that of a woman. It's too late, I've already understood that my envelope is only an object, I haven't belonged to myself for a long time, my body belongs to others. Exhibited on silver paper, for all to see, delivered in my simplest nudity, the others took these elements that were to be mine. I am no longer mine. I think it was from those moments that everything fell apart. No doubt that's why I've always felt surreal: I'm nothing but fragments without order. The little girl shown naked, the beauty of the model exhibited and fashioned, the horrors of man and war, I've seen it all, everything has the same underlying violence. The nonsense. How did you want me to love you?

To love another, when one is only an assembly of oneself?

I think I owe a lot to Edward, you know, Steichen, the Vogue photographer. He made me pose for the magazine at the insistence of Condé Nast which almost saved me from an accident in the street, it's funny. The hazards of life. Perfect features, such a contemporary boyish grace, blablabla. In any case, he was the one who introduced me to photography and at 20, I had the impression of finding some keys to assembling the puzzle. In 1929, I packed my suitcase in the direction of Paris, my head full of desires, believing that I would find the pieces there to continue to "pick myself up", there were my brothers, the surrealists... You know, with Man Ray , it was confrontational, as broken as me, and he confined me to his macho vision of surrealism. He signed the works in my place, and he never recognized that solarization was a bit like my “baby”. I felt close to this baby, I pampered him, he allowed me to tell my story, to create elements of my own labyrinth. So I wanted to fly on my own, and in 1932, I went back and set up a photo studio in New York with my brother: light and presto, bankruptcy… But I was on track, I was a photographer.

Your father, Antony, was surrealism incarnate, and long before he became my husband, we both walked through the horrors of war, Lee and Roland Penrose. War correspondent in 1939? You speak, correspondent for Vogue! So I found nothing better than to have the models pose in devastated places, still smoking, with the reality of fashion at the time, to try to open the eyes of the world to what was going on. There was a kind of click and I ended up imposing the hidden face on them, spitting these horrors on them; I was me, the being without a body, the witness-photographer of the concentration camps, emaciated beings with even less body than me...

So yes I sank.

Depression enveloped me in its dangerous protection, I let my uneasiness live, I felt myself living in this pain, in this destruction of the man I saw, like the surrealism screaming inside me. Alcohol, war, my life, my being cut up, all of this makes me a broken puppet who has tried to come to life with pieces that don't fit together.

I tried Anthony, to find the assembly plan, I never found it. Neither in Poughkeepsie where I was born in 1907, nor in New York, nor in France, nor in Egypt, nor during the war, nor when landing on the beaches of Saint-Malo, nor even in Hitler's bathroom in Berchtesgaden, in his own bathtub in which I took pictures hoping to understand. Perhaps you will find it, despite the elements that you miss so badly because of my absence. Just be proud of me, what my eyes have seen and shown. I am not a woman, I am not a mother, I am not a photographer, I am a fragmented being, a surreal painting, I am Elisabeth Lee Miller.

The soft and firm gaze that has seen so much quivers, letting out a single tear and the sparkling light slowly fades on July 21, 1977, exhausted by this life of clichés forever revealed.

By RoxtheRohJournalist Photographer

Largely inspired by the life of Photographer Lee Miller 1907-1977 "I imagined this bio as a confession from Lee to his son, I wanted to make her express herself on her exceptional and incredible life, to honor a female photographer because they are too often in the background. »

Author of the article: RoxtheRhoJournalist Photographerhttps://twitter.com/RoxtheRoh