"I'd rather take a picture than be one!"
The formula is from Lee Miller.
She sums up her life which is an adventure novel and will be, in 2023, the subject of a biopic directed by the American Ellen Kuras with Marion Cotillard and Jude Law in the cast and, in the role of Lee Miller, the enigmatic Kate Winslet.
This will complete the rehabilitation of the career of the photographer who has long been reduced to the cliché of surrealist muse, boyish short hair, long swan shot and vine body... Antony Penrose, the son she had with the painter Roland Penrose, had been retorted by the Moma of New York, when he wanted to rehabilitate the work of his mother, that she was only "a footnote in the life of Man Ray".
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Gaëlle Morel, curator of the exhibition "Lee Miller, professional photographer (1932-1945)"* which unfolds in the Van Gogh space, in Arles, takes the opposite view of this macho and erroneous remark, by focusing on the years when she was no longer with her mentor, showing her work for
Vogue
, the studio she ran in New York and especially her war photos in the concentration camps.
Because if Lee Miller was the model revealed by Condé Nast, in New York, then the model of the solarized photos of Man Ray, in Paris, she changed course in 1932.
Full screen
Ladies Pidoux hats (with original Vogue Studio crop mark), London, England, 1939. Courtesy Lee Miller Archives.
Lee Miller
war correspondent
Return to New York where she becomes a photographer, having her own studio managed with her brother Erik, shooting the portrait of the actors of the good society and the artists in vogue.
This is how the exhibition begins… Except that Lee's itinerary is made up of ruptures, passions, commitments too.
Worldly salons, chic toilets no longer interest him.
We are at the dawn of 1944. Lee Miller becomes one of the five war correspondents and covers the conflict for
Vogue
, signing a first report of 14 pages.
I beg you to believe that all of this is true
Lee Miller
After the Liberation of Paris, she follows the advance of American troops in Germany, escorted by her accomplice, David E. Scherman, reporter for
Life magazine.
In April 1945, she discovered the Dachau concentration camp.
Lee Miller photographs, documents these apocalypse scenes, corpses piled up in front of the crematory ovens, survivors like skeletons in striped pajamas, accumulation of bones... His photos of concentration camps presented alongside his studio and commissioning activity create the amazement, bewilderment in the visitor.
The telegram she sends to
Vogue
, along with her photographs, will be published as it is: “I beg you to believe that all this is true”.
"Lee Miller, Professional Photographer (1932-1945)", until September 25, Espace Van Gogh, Arles.
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