Lee Miller, the model turned war photographer
The men and women who covered World War II came from all manner of backgrounds, but Lee Miller’s path to becoming a war correspondent was particularly unique.
Born Elizabeth Miller on April 23, 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, she began her professional life as a fashion model. An image of her drawn by the French artist Georges Lepape appeared on the March 15, 1927 edition of Vogue, the start of her long-running association with the magazine as both subject and contributor.
While Miller dabbled in drawing and painting, she eventually embraced photography as her medium of choice. Living in Paris in her 20s, she fell in with the likes of Man Ray and Pablo Picasso, collaborating with Ray as an artist in her own right. She was established within the surrealist movement when she stepped away from work for a few years after getting married in 1934.
When war broke out in Europe, Miller hoped to cover it as a photographer for Vogue but was initially rejected. Living in London with the man who would become her second husband, the artist Roland Penrose, she eventually got some domestic assignments with Vogue before finally talking her way into military accreditation late in 1942.
As the handful of other women who had been accredited as correspondents already had learned, securing approval from the brass and wearing a uniform didn’t mean covering combat. Women were kept away from the front lines and officialdom largely sought to funnel their coverage toward work being done by women.
Nurses working in field hospitals and evacuation units soon became a favorite topic for many of the correspondents, as those venues were about as close as they could get to the front lines. Miller traveled to Normandy in July 1944 to photograph and write about a medical unit inland from Omaha Beach, one of several times during the war that she combined words and images for a Vogue spread. She wrote in that Sept. 15 issue:
Three of the patients were conscious. The far one was nearly completed; that is, his leg had been dealt with and clench-faced men were patting the last of a plaster bandage in place. In the chiaroscuro of khaki and white, I was reminded of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting ‘The Carrying of the Cross.’
The wounded man had watched me take his photograph and had made an effort, with his good hand, to smooth his hair. I didn’t know that he was already asleep with sodium pentothal when they started on his other arm. I had turned away for fear my face would betray to him what I had seen.
In mid-August, Miller found a way to get herself to the front, joining up with the 83rd Infantry Division for its advance on Saint-Malo. She had done so without approval, and SHAEF dispatched Maj. Charles R. Madary to locate and retrieve her.
“When I found her she was up on the rampart of an old fort making pictures of the shelling of the fort on the Isle de Cezezemore,” Madary would tell his hometown Baltimore Sun that October. “There was a flock of hens beside her taking a dust bath and an unexploded German hand grenade. She didn’t want to leave. She had lived abroad several years before the war and speak French, and the American commander wanted her for an interpreter when the German garrison surrendered.”
Though Miller faced a rebuke for getting so close to the front without authorization, she was able to return to her beloved Paris after its liberation in late August.
Given her background, it’s no surprise Miller’s wartime images often blended photojournalism with a more artistic approach. But sometimes she went straight for the gut, as in her text and photo piece “Germans Are Like This,” which contrasted scenes of “well-fed” civilians with the conditions found in concentration camps.
Miller had been to Buchenwald and Dachau and was appalled by what she witnessed. On April 30, the day after Dachau was liberated, she traveled to nearby Munich with Life magazine photographer David E. Scherman. The pair entered Adolf Hitler’s apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz and carefully arranged a photograph.
Miller walked into the bathroom in her combat boots, tracking dirt from Dachau all over the bath mat, then set a portrait of Hitler on the edge of the bathtub. She took off her clothes and climbed in to bathe as Scherman fired the shutter with Miller looking away from the camera.
That iconic image can be viewed at the Lee Miller Archives, which are maintained by her son Antony, also a photographer.
The horrors Miller witnessed covering the war, particularly in those final months, never really left her. She suffered from depression and PTSD in the decades to come. Miller died of cancer in 1977 at age 70.