Who was Lee Miller

A. Born in New York in 1907, Lee Miller became a model in Paris in the 1920s. She was lover, model and photographic collaborator of the Surrealist photographer Man Ray, and her other contacts in the New York and Paris art worlds of the time influenced the development of her own photography as a photographer with Surrealist leanings as well as her fashion work. Numbered among her friends were Andr� Breton, Paul Eluard, Joan Mir� and Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau - who cast her as an armless statue who comes to life in his film Le Sang d'un Poet - and Picasso was inspired by her beauty to paint four portraits of her.

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Q. But isn't she also known as a war photographer

A. Yes. In what must have seemed a complete change of direction she was accredited by the US War Department in December 1942 as a war correspondent for Vogue magazine. She had worked for Vogue on fashion assignments throughout the war, photographing the likes of Dylan Thomas, Margot Fonteyn and James Mason as well as Henry Moore sketching in the air raid shelters of London. After D-Day in 1944 and for the remainder of the war Miller followed the US Army across Europe, taking photographs in Buchenwald and Dachau and the burning of Hitler's house at Berchtesgaden. Her work gave the magazine an extraordinary hotline to the front in France, and her humanist approach to war, conditioned by her preoccupation with Surrealism, produced some of the most powerful photographs of the Second World War to appear in general circulation.

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Q. What do they say about her

A. A critical biography of Miller entitled Lee Miller: Photographer by Jane Livingston describes Miller's work as follows: 'The Surrealist photograph that found in the ordinary its own quality of strangeness or contortion, rather that the one contrived by artificial juxtaposition, was immediately more palatable to her [Miller]. Lee Miller's natural way with the camera was to use its framing capacity... as a powerful tool for isolating reality.' Her Piano by Broadwood and Charlotte Street from the 'Grim Glory' series of 1940 are fine examples of such unforced Surrealist juxtapositions.

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However, it might be posited�that her greatest Surrealist moment was when the Vogue issue of June 1945 reproduced her photographs of the Nazi death camps among the fashion spreads and recipe pages.

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Q. What about her later life

A. After 1945 she lived in Sussex with the English Surrealist artist and modern art collector Roland Penrose, whom she had met in Paris in 1937. She effectively retired as a photographer in the 1950s, but still managed to produce powerful work, often shot at her farm, which retained the ghost of Surrealism amid the scenes of domesticity.

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Lee Miller died in 1977.

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There is an exhibition of Miller's work on at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, running until 9 September 2001.

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See also the article on Surrealism at Article.go id=1070&category_id=null

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By Simon Smith