Lee Miller

Portraits from a Life

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by Richard Calvocoressi

Thames and Hudson

Due/Published May 2005, 176 pages, paper

ISBN 0500285225

New in paper (S05)

Miller was one of the twentieth century's most accomplished photographers. At the age of twenty, she was discovered on a New York street by Condé Nast, who instantly decided to put her face on the cover of Vogue. Two years later she left America for Paris to become a photographer herself. There she became the disciple and lover of Man Ray and an intimate of the Paris art world. World War II saw her as Vogue's war correspondent, present at the liberation of Paris and when the Dachau concentration camp was first entered. Her later years were spent in London and at her home on the Sussex downs, where she kept up the many friendships she had made.

Miller came into contact with a wide range of people: painters, sculptors, actors, novelists, poets, journalists, musicians, dancers, and leaders in the field of fashion. She photographed them all, and many became close friends. In Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life, the finest of these photographs are shown together for the first time. They include not only perceptive and sympathetic portraits of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Dora Maar, Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, Igor Stravinsky, Yehudi Menuhin, Dylan Thomas, Colette, and a host of others but also pictures of Londoners in the Blitz, of Parisians celebrating their liberation, and of the aftermath of the Third Reich. An exhibition based on this show will be held at the Getty in 2003. 135 duotone photographs.