Talk - Lee Miller’s War

Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller was born in New York State in 1907 and died in Chiddingly in 1977. In her life she fulfilled many startlingly diverse roles: she was a supermodel and a photographer; a surrealist artist and muse; a wife and mother; among her many lovers were Picasso and Man Ray. But, like many of her generation, it was the Second World War that pushed her to the limits of her capabilities. In 1939, when war was declared, she was a surrealist fashion photographer trying to cope with the restrictions forced on her world by the blackouts and shortages in London. By 1945 she was on the front line in France and Germany, a battle-hardened war correspondent whose photojournalism brought the realities of conflict home to an avid readership on both sides of the Atlantic. The war was the period in which Lee Miller came of age. She never got over it.

Antony Penrose, the son of Miller and her second husband Roland Penrose, is the author of the book ‘Lee Miller’s War’ and he will be giving a slide show presentation and talk in Newhaven Fort on her work in that period, with his daughter Ami Bouhassane, who will be reading extracts from Miller’s wartime journalism and diaries. “Lee had a lot of friends in occupied France,” he says. “She was very taken up by their plight. Max Ernst, for example, had to literally run for his life from the Nazis. But what could she do? Being an American woman, she couldn’t join the British army. So she decided to do what she could, by maximising her talent as a photographer.”