Lee Miller: A Life

Elissa Schappell

It seems fitting that Carolyn Burke, whose first biography corrected history's error of undervaluing the avant-garde poet and artist Mina Loy, has written "Lee Miller: A Life." Fitting, also, that she begins the tale of a forgotten visionary photographer who was muse and lover to some of the most influential artists of the early 20th century, as well as one of the few women able to transcend this role and become an artistic force in her own right, with Miller's birth as a muse.
— The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Janet Maslin

Ms. Burke's approach is generous even when facts present Miller in a less than flattering light…while [she] sometimes lets lists of parties, trips and famous friends overwhelm her, she also captures the excitement of Miller's omnivorous spirit…Certainly the book provides connective tissue between the woman and her work during the most vibrant part of her life.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Miller (1907-1977) began her career as a fashion model, and quickly decamped for Paris, where she became Man Ray's muse and student. After they split, she returned to Manhattan for a brief stint as a studio photographer, but eventually returned to Europe. Her surrealist background led to her taking stunning photos of the London Blitz, but she shot her most memorable-and disturbing-images accompanying American troops from Paris to Dachau as a war correspondent for Vogue. Burke's meticulously detailed biography reveals how keenly Miller's wartime experiences haunted her during her final troubled decades, but it also probes sympathetically into the artist's other significant trauma: a childhood rape, which was, Burke conjectures, exacerbated by her father's practice of photographing her nude well into early adulthood. Burke (Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy) writes with a careful sense of how Miller might have approached her work and of how it is perceived by modern viewers. Her descriptions of Miller's imagery are so vivid that, despite the dozens of photographs reproduced here, readers will find themselves wanting to see more. As the first major biographer outside the Miller family, she traces a dynamic life that embodies the spirit of the 20th century's first half. Photos. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Dec. 5) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A great beauty, Lee Miller (1907-77) started modeling at a very early age, eventually appearing in the pages of Vogue. Behind the camera, the intrepid, creative, and talented Miller went on to work as a portraitist, a fashion photojournalist, and a war correspondent. She covered the London blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the burning of Hitler's house, all the while creating striking and haunting images that reflected her surrealist sensibility. Given Miller's involvement with dozens of the last century's major artists-Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Man Ray among them-this biography reads like a social history and who's who of the era and its luminaries. Biographer, art critic, and translator Burke (Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy) discusses many of Miller's photographs in depth, but the 24 pages of stills here (and the 58 that appear in the text) are probably not going to satisfy readers. It may be advisable to order books solely covering Miller's photographs to complement the biography. Otherwise, this meticulously researched chronicle is a valuable contribution to World War II literature, photography, Surrealism, and biography collections. Highly recommended.-Ann D. Carlson, Oak Park and River Forest H.S. Lib., IL Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Illuminating life of the once-renowned model, photographer and traveler who drew few distinctions between life and art. Born to a well-to-do industrialist, Lee Miller (1909-77) was raped by a family acquaintance at the age of seven; or so, writes Burke (Becoming Modern, 1996), it "must be inferred from the patterns of her later life." Whatever the unknowable but inferable facts, Miller seems to have regarded herself as damaged goods; it probably did not help matters when her father's nude photograph of Miller, "December Morn," was published, becoming, in its time, "as famous, or notorious, as the Mona Lisa." Later traumas would come, and Miller, a free spirit bound, would process them between what she called her good and bad sides. As a disciple of Alfred Steichen and devotee and lover of Man Ray in Paris, she played the ingenue a little but was more knowing than all that; indeed, she recalled, she was a bit of a fiend. Ray came eventually to regard her as a threat, though it was likely for the ever-deepening quality of her work as a photographer rather than any conflict she herself set in motion. She posed for Picasso, spent pleasant hours with the surrealists, knew Hemingway and Gellhorn, had the kind of life that the present-day bohemian can only aspire to; yet Miller fully came into her own as a combat correspondent (for Vogue) in Europe during WWII, photographing the liberation of Paris and the conquest of Germany. She later recalled, "I got in over my head. I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils." Wealthy (she married an English nobleman), well traveled and well connected, Miller became progressively less well known as the years rolled on and her life became lesstumultuous, if always more complicated than other people's lives. Burke's graceful biography restores Miller to attention; students of art photography, in particular, will want a look. Agent: Anne Borchardt/Georges Borchardt Inc.

New York Times

Lee Miller went through life as a serial dazzler, adopting and shedding…guises a chameleon might envy.—Janet Maslin, New York Times

 

 

 

 

— Janet Maslin

Washington Post Book World

“If, like Auntie Mame, you believe that 'Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death,' you'll surely want to read Carolyn Burke's delightful biography of Lee Miller. . . . Delightful, meticulously researched, fascinating.… Miller’s life had many phases, all of them interesting, and Burke captures them in [this] fine biography.”

New York Times

“Lee Miller went through life as a serial dazzler, adopting and shedding…guises a chameleon might envy.”—Janet Maslin, New York Times