Lee Miller Was Never Not in the Frame

The Lee Miller (1907-1977) retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris opens with the famed photographer not behind the lens, but in front of it.

Miller, who was a model, muse, surrealist and a fashion and war photographer, first appears to visitors in an excerpt from Jean Cocteau’s 1930 surrealist film, “Blood of a Poet.” Then 23, Miller played an armless antique statue which suddenly — creepily — comes to life, driving the titular poet mad. The marble oddity then transforms into a femme fatale, then a card player, then once again back into a statue, which is ultimately destroyed by its creator.

Cocteau’s experimental film seemed to foreshadow Miller’s fate, anticipating both her many lives and the ultimately destructive power of the male gaze on her identity and work. Despite her many incarnations, despite Miller herself saying, “I would rather take a photograph than be one,” she was never fully allowed to leave the frame: again and again, however insistently she tried to become the eye behind the camera, she was pushed back into the role of icon.

How should we look at Miller?

This is a key issue at the heart of the exhibit of 250 works — the largest Miller retrospective to date. Indeed, the presentation is explicitly designed to rescue Miller from her stereotypically feminine roles as muse, iconic beauty and lover, instead giving her her due as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. And yet, the exhibition cannot seem to escape the gravitational pull of her image.

In spite of the curators’ intentions, in the first two rooms, not to mention the exhibit poster itself, visitors encounter multiple images of Miller before they ever see a single photograph by her.

Case in point: Miller, once described by TIME Magazine as “the possessor of the most beautiful navel in Paris,” appears first as Edward Steichen’s modern American blonde in the glossy pages of Vogue; Cocteau’s aforementioned living statue; and Man Ray’s student, model, and lover. Everywhere she went, artists and creators couldn’t help but capture her image; they couldn’t help but stare. The visitor can’t either.

This is what makes the Musée d’Art Moderne’s curatorial decision to include Miller’s first known self-portrait — a photobooth strip taken in 1925 — among the early fashion photographs, such a brilliant curatorial move. The photo was taken only two years after the intervention of the Photomaton (the French name for the photobooth). It foreshadows Miller’s lifelong fascination with new technologies but, perhaps even more important, suggests an attempt to position herself as the artist, the one doing the seeing, rather than as the object being seen.

As the exhibit suggests, questions of looking and exposure seemingly shaped Miller’s life long before she picked up a camera. Her father was obsessed with cameras, and photographed Miller compulsively when she was a child and teenager, often nude. “I was practically born and brought up in a darkroom,” Miller is quoted in the opening gallery. 

Once she was finally able to step behind the camera herself, Miller’s work often circled around exposure, fragmentation, and bodily vulnerability. And no wonder: At the age of 7, she was raped by a family friend, contracted gonorrhoea, and subjected to painful medical treatments throughout her life — something the exhibit only obliquely refers to.

Femininity despite catastrophe

While her (male) artist friends — Ray, Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso — often portrayed violence against women in aesthetically pleasing ways, Miller’s surrealist photographs from the 1930s portrayed the female body as something inherently precarious: entangled limbs; a disembodied head displayed under a bell jar; cropped necks transformed into columns; a severed breast served on a plate after a mastectomy.

Even her fashion photography carried traces of menace. During the Blitz, while working for British Vogue, she posed elegant models amid bombed-out London buildings, bullet holes becoming decorative motifs, rubble becoming the backdrop.

And yet, femininity persisted despite catastrophe.

The war coverage

As a war correspondent, Miller followed Allied troops through Europe, landing in Normandy, Paris, Alsace, Buchenwald, and Dachau. According to several accounts, Miller climbed inside one wagon filled with corpses from liberated concentration camps to photograph the dead at eye-level, while male colleagues hesitated. There are photos of women accused of collaboration walking the streets with shaved heads; a young blonde girl lying on a sofa, apparently asleep, who turns out to be the daughter of Leipzig’s deputy mayor, dead after taking cyanide as American troops entered the German city.

The exhibition’s final rooms are almost unbearable in their accumulated documentation of this horror.

War photography seemed to offer Miller endless opportunities to move closer to trauma. Sometimes, at least to me, it seemed as if she consistently pushed herself toward danger with an almost compulsive determination. And yet, decades after her death, the image most people associate with Miller’s war photography is one that ironically, features Miller bathing in Hitler’s bathtub. It was taken by her friend and lover David Scherman. The scene is meticulously set: A tiled bathroom and tub; a portrait of Adolf Hitler sits on the tub’s edge and, nearby, a small classical statuette of a female nude rests on a table. The bathmat is stained with the mud from Miller’s boots, while Miller herself sits inside the tub, washing herself with a cloth, as though trying to scrub away the filth of everything she has witnessed.

After decades of Lee Miller scholarship, a Kate Winslet biopic, major retrospectives in London, in Paris until August 2 and, starting August 29, in Chicago, this is still The Photograph.

Leaving the exhibition, it’s tempting to frame Miller's story as a vindication, if belated: The muse finally recognized as an artist in her own right. Instead, the retrospective reveals something more unsettling. Miller was never merely overlooked. She was, at times, over-seen.

After the war, Miller gradually stopped taking photographs. She drank heavily, and retreated to the English countryside. Her son has said she never spoke to him about her years behind or before the lens.

“Do you think it so easy, getting rid of a wound?” queried the Miller statue years earlier in Cocteau’s “Blood of a Poet.” The retrospective never fully answers that question, but it does suggest that Miller spent the rest of her life trying.