Hello dear reader, we are back with another post about What’s On. February has been good to us bringing to the table the Vogue 100, and Taylor Wessing Portrait Exhibition, but don’t worry March is here and is bringing us a amazing exhibition *drum roll* LEE MILLER A WOMAN’S WAR.
INTRODUCTION
This amazing exhibition explores the impact of the Second World War on women’s lives through the photography of Lee Miller, who is one of the most famous and important war photographers of the twentieth century.
This Imperial Museum exhibition document’s Miller’s progressive vision of the women’s roles and lives in UK and Europe as she travelled between countries before, during and in the immediate aftermath of war.
ABOUT LEE MILLER
Elizabeth “Lee” Miller (April 23, 1907- July 21, 1977), was an American Photographer born in New York, in 1907, she was a successful fashion model in NYC in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became an established fashion and fine art photographer. During World War 2, she became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue.
LEGACY
Her son Antony Penrose owns the house and offers tours of the works of Miller and Roland Penrose. The house is home to the private collections of Miller and Penrose, their own work and some of their favourite pieces of art. In the dining room, the fireplace was decorated in vivid colours by Roland Penrose.
Throughout her life, Miller did very little to promote her own photographic work. That Miller’s work is known today is mainly due to the efforts of her son, who has been studying, conserving, and promoting his mother’s work since the early 1980s. Her pictures are accessible at the Lee Miller Archive.
In 1985, Penrose published the first biography of Miller, entitled The Lives of Lee Miller. Since then, a number of books, mostly accompanying exhibitions of Miller’s photographs, have been written by art historians and writers such as Jane Livingstone, Richard Calvocoressi, and Mark Haworth-Booth. Interviews with Penrose form the core of the 1995 biographical documentary Lee Miller: Through the Mirror, made with David Scherman and writer-director Sylvain Roumette. Penrose and Scherman collaborated in the book Lee Miller’s War: Photographer and Correspondent With the Allies in Europe 1944–45, 1992.
