Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life

In 1929, Lee Miller, already a legendary fashion model, left the United States to study photography in Paris. Here she became the disciple and lover of Man Ray, and she was soon taking on both portrait and fashion assignments for Vogue and running her own studio. The Second World War saw her as Vogue's war correspondent: she covered the siege of Saint Malo, the liberation of Paris, and the entry of the U.S. Army into the Dachau concentration camp. Her later years were spent in London and Sussex with her husband, the painter and writer Roland Penrose. During her extraordinary life, Miller came into contact with an astonishing range of painters, sculptors, actors, writers, musicians, fashion designers, and socialites. Many became her friends and the subjects of her penetrating portraits. The finest of these photographs are collected together here, along with a selection of portraits of Miller herself, taken by other photographers. The images include not only Miller's highly perceptive and sympathetic studies of Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire, and others but also her pictures of unsung individuals engaged in war work and powerful photographs of victims and perpetrators of Nazi oppression. 157 duotone illustrations.