68. TELL HER STORY: Lee Miller

Lee Miller photographer born on 23 April 1907

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68. TELL HER STORY

Lee Miller photographer born on 23 April 1907

Continuing from last week’s post on Nicholas Winton, we return to similar themes this week: an important life story that might have been lost is saved by a son or daughter writing a memoir or biography; their work is published; the book makes a superb film starring the best actors; both films were released in 2024.

There are further parallels: Winton’s story was written by his daughter; Lee Miller’s story by her son, Antony in The Lives of Lee Miller which became the film Lee. Winton’s wife discovered Nicholas Winton’s past in a scrapbook; Antony Miller and his wife, Suzanna, discovered over 60,000 negatives, prints, journals and cameras in the attic of Miller’s home, but only years after she had passed away. This carries its own pathos as the film presents to us.

By contrast, Nicholas Winton is most remembered for his heroic achievements in 1939, on the eve of World War Two, in rescuing Jewish children from Hitler’s Nazi army, whereas Lee Miller’s best work is done during the war(1939-45) and in the final days of Nazism. Miller’s job or vocation as a war photographer was to tell the story of what was happening. She unflinchingly faced the horrors discovered as German domination crumbed and she put her camera in between her fear and the victim to record the horrific outcomes of the war.

Lee Miller in 1943

By U.S. Army Official Photograph - http://astro.temple.edu/~gurwin/hist.0690syb2005.html, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77888314

In Vogue

In her lifetime, Lee Miller’s genius featured, not through the major newspapers of the day with their male-dominated editors, but through in the magazine, Vogue. The female editor, Audrey Withers, championed Miller’s photographs focusing on the otherwise overlooked British women in their important war work in the auxiliary territorial service and as searchlight operators.

Vogue magazine has the long-held reputation of being in the vanguard of fashion. What I hadn’t realised is that in the nineteen-thirties and forties Vogue was also in the vanguard of news coverage.

Kate Winslet as Lee Miller

In Ellen Kuras’ film, one of my favourite female actors, Kate Winslet, superbly plays the role of Lee Miller, a lone woman, a war correspondent and a photographer, in a male-dominated profession. The combination of Winslet’s performance, the filming and direction, make me feel the dust and grit of endless unwashed days in war-zones, knowing that however hungry, tired or frightened they are as photographers and reporters, the people whose stories they are telling have suffered in ways beyond imagining. Their duty in the moment is to record what they see in such a way that it tells a truth to those seeing the photographs at home, where although war-time Britain had its own sufferings, the occupied countries of Europe had horrors to unfold, such as the suffering Hitler had imposed in the death camps Miller visited to witness the starving, skeletal survivors and the mass graves of twisted bones.

Such is the dirt and dust that we understand the temptation to take off her clothes and fill the bathtub in Hitler’s abandoned Munich apartment with water. But Miller is not thinking of a nice bubble bath but the power of the mock-up picture. Assisted by her colleague, David Sherman from Life magazine, she poses in Hitler’s bathtub. She knew how to make the most of the brief opportunity, based on her early modelling career for Vogue, creating the famous picture just hours before Hitler and Braun committed suicide.

I have long been concerned that women are overlooked and their achievements forgotten, deliberately not recorded, incorrectly recorded, or a man is credited for their work, so I am very grateful to Antony Miller for giving us the story of his remarkable mother. I am grateful too to Ellen Kuras for her stunning film Lee and for cinema, as without the films One Life and Lee, I would have remained ignorant of both lives.

Lee Miller: 23 April 1907 - 21 July 1977

Read more about Lee Miller and see her pictures: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/lee-miller-house

Writing Challenge

Who is your unsung hero? Although most of us don’t have the time to write a full biography, we do have memories, a story or some important detail of the past that impacts on the present. If you have a story but don’t know how to get started, write down the basic details as notes or bullet points and try to add to them, perhaps set aside an hour a week to ‘flesh out’ the story. Or use a voice memo to begin documenting your knowledge.

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