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Lee Miller: A Life
Lee Miller’s life embodied all the contradictions and complications of the twentieth century: a model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and domestic goddess, she was also America's first female war correspondent. Carolyn Burke, a biographer and art critic, here reveals how the muse who inspired Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso could be the same person who unflinchingly photographed the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Burke captures all the verve and energy of Miller’s life: from her early childhood trauma to her stint as a Vogue model and art-world ingénue, from her harrowing years as a war correspondent to her unconventional marriages and passion for gourmet cooking. A lavishly illustrated story of art and beauty, sex and power, Modernism and Surrealism, Lee Miller illuminates an astonishing woman’s journey from art object to artist.
426 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2005
135 people are currently reading
1564 people want to read
About the author
Carolyn Burke
23 books75 followersCarolyn Burke was born in Sydney, spent many years in Paris, and now lives in Santa Cruz, California. She graduated from Swarthmore College and earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University. She is a member of PEN and the Authors Guild. A practitioner of Zen Buddhism, she took the precepts with Tenshin Reb Anderson in 2010.
Her latest book, No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, was published in 2011 by Knopf (U.S.) and Bloomsbury (U.K.) Since then it has appeared in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Czech and Russian. The definitive life of the chanteuse, No Regrets has been called "an eloquent embrace of the famed French singer-songwriter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review); "sympathetic . . . captivating . . . highly effective" (New York Review of Books); "masterful storytelling" (Library Journal); and listed among the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sunday Times (U.K.). Burke has performed with singers of Piaf's repertoire in Paris (Caveau des Légendes), London (The Vortex), Los Angeles (Catalina Jazz Club), and San Francisco (City Lights/Litquake). She recently took part in the BBC 4 special on Piaf's iconic song "Non, je ne regrette rien" and in the U.S. Postal Service's launch of their Piaf stamp.
Burke's Lee Miller: A Life, published by Knopf and Bloomsbury in 2005 and Autrement in 2007, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award. The Chicago Tribune gave it a cover review; People called it "a great read"; The Telegraph (U.K.) judged, "Lee Miller was an astounding woman, brought memorably to life by this astounding book." Burke appears in the BBC's docudrama Lee Miller: A Crazy Way of Seeing.
Her interest in Miller began when she met the photographer while working on her first book, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (FSG, 1996). Becoming Modern won praise in the TLS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Nation. The definitive life of the expatriate artist/poet, it sparked a Loy revival, including a cabaret musical about her.
Burke's essays and translations have appeared in many magazines, including Heat, Vogue, Poetry Flash, La Nouvelle Revue Française, and the New Yorker. Her art writing includes essays in Artpress, Art in America, and in exhibition catalogues (Roland Penrose and Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer; Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery).
She has taught non-fiction and life-writing at book festivals and universities in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and France. Recent appearances include talks at CUNY's Women Writing about Women seminar, NYU's Maison Française, Princeton University, Universities of New South Wales and Sydney; radio talks and readings (NPR, BBC, Australian Broadcasting Company); and for No Regrets, musical soirées in some of these same venues.
She is currently writing a group portrait about the intertwined lives and work of four twentieth century artists.
Her latest book, No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, was published in 2011 by Knopf (U.S.) and Bloomsbury (U.K.) Since then it has appeared in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Czech and Russian. The definitive life of the chanteuse, No Regrets has been called "an eloquent embrace of the famed French singer-songwriter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review); "sympathetic . . . captivating . . . highly effective" (New York Review of Books); "masterful storytelling" (Library Journal); and listed among the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sunday Times (U.K.). Burke has performed with singers of Piaf's repertoire in Paris (Caveau des Légendes), London (The Vortex), Los Angeles (Catalina Jazz Club), and San Francisco (City Lights/Litquake). She recently took part in the BBC 4 special on Piaf's iconic song "Non, je ne regrette rien" and in the U.S. Postal Service's launch of their Piaf stamp.
Burke's Lee Miller: A Life, published by Knopf and Bloomsbury in 2005 and Autrement in 2007, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award. The Chicago Tribune gave it a cover review; People called it "a great read"; The Telegraph (U.K.) judged, "Lee Miller was an astounding woman, brought memorably to life by this astounding book." Burke appears in the BBC's docudrama Lee Miller: A Crazy Way of Seeing.
Her interest in Miller began when she met the photographer while working on her first book, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (FSG, 1996). Becoming Modern won praise in the TLS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Nation. The definitive life of the expatriate artist/poet, it sparked a Loy revival, including a cabaret musical about her.
Burke's essays and translations have appeared in many magazines, including Heat, Vogue, Poetry Flash, La Nouvelle Revue Française, and the New Yorker. Her art writing includes essays in Artpress, Art in America, and in exhibition catalogues (Roland Penrose and Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer; Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery).
She has taught non-fiction and life-writing at book festivals and universities in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and France. Recent appearances include talks at CUNY's Women Writing about Women seminar, NYU's Maison Française, Princeton University, Universities of New South Wales and Sydney; radio talks and readings (NPR, BBC, Australian Broadcasting Company); and for No Regrets, musical soirées in some of these same venues.
She is currently writing a group portrait about the intertwined lives and work of four twentieth century artists.
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November 26, 2015
Gotta be honest here: I was thinking about writing a book about Lee Miller, so I was starting to read a little bit about her here and there. This biography is pretty complete, and it's so faceted it's amazing. Burke did a hell of a job, and I'm going to move onto her bio of Mina Loy next, I was so impressed with her work on this one. I completely hated Lee Miller in the first third of the book when she is a Vogue model and a muse for Man Ray; fell in awe of her in the second act when she becomes the only woman photographer to see combat, and in the last act, I sympathized and actually pitied her as her life withers away with booze, PTSD and unhealthy relationships. She was a force the whole way through--first, just a troublemaker, then an unrepentant slut, then she transforms into a major badass in WWII, then into a bitter, nasty alcoholic. Burke doesn't sugar coat or hide anything, and that is commendable. I loathed Miller, I loved her, I was ashamed for her, I felt empathy for her. I wish I could write that book--but four other novelists, I've found, have beat me to it. Perhaps for the best. One last thought; her relationship with her father was weird, disturbing and upsetting.
January 15, 2024
Not the Book I Expected about an Unexpectedly Complex Life
I am giving this 2007 biography of Lee Miller 5 stars—rating it very highly, just as many critics raved about the book when it first appeared. And, even though it was not the book I expected to read, I am glad that it was my in-depth introduction to Miller's life—so that the other books I plan to read about her in 2024 make more sense.
If you are learning about this exceptional journalist, visual artist and all-around cultural "defiant spirit," then welcome to the kaleidoscope that was Lee Miller's 70 years on this planet.
Her Wikipedia entry begins: "Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller, aka Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), was an American photographer and photojournalist." But that's like saying Mark Twain was an American author or that Lucille Ball was a comic actress. So, how does any author even begin to unpack a life with as many facets as Miller's explosive career? Well, biographer Carolyn Burke clearly likes the phrase "defiant spirit," two words that I circled on a page fairly late in her book so that I could recall those words for this review—and then I found the phrase again in the book's final paragraph.
Burke's biography could have been titled: Defiant Spirit—a Life of Lee Miller
What Burke does document repeatedly is this truth: Miller lived her life as if she was determined to plunge through every social, cultural and artistic barrier she encountered. And, even though I am fascinated with her life as a life-long journalist myself, I feel incapable of even suggesting what to think of some chapters of her life.
How did Burke address the most startling chapters? She exhaustively researched them and then wrote about them in plain, clear language—reporting usually without commentary on what unfolded.
What do I mean by startling?
Well, Miller became a photographer because her father was fascinated with the medium and introduced her to it as a little girl—and through her youth—by making many nude studies of her that he proudly displayed to family and friends. And that Miller displayed as well. Even in her childhood, her father trained the girl how to run a darkroom, developing the prints they took together—and eventually her own photographs as well. In fact, one of her requests as a child was for a chemistry set of her own so she could further study the basis of photography.
Or consider: Mid-way through this biography, there's a chapter that describes Pablo Picasso's creation of a series of nude paintings of Miller, including one famous painting in the series that highlights Miller's vagina shaped by the artist to suggest an eye. Burke tells us that Picasso intended this as a visual metaphor for the lens of Miller's camera and a key to understanding her approach to sexuality. Apparently, both of them felt it was a valuable visual insight and, once again, both were proud of the series.
I think that's why Burke keeps using that phrase "defiant spirit." It's almost as though Miller embraced crashing through taboos and welcomed public discussions of issues that today are hotly debated among cultural critics but—back during the course of her own life—were so startling that apparently the rest of the journalistic world simply overlooked them.
All that has changed over the past couple of decades, when the world seems ready and eager to explore her life and a flood of books about Miller have cascaded from publishing houses. When one noted art magazine recently was asked to recommend a first book about Lee Miller—the result was an article explaining that readers should begin by reading five books about her. That list of five includes another shocker: A cookbook! Well, at least a book about Lee Miller's relationship to food, complete with recipes, and the meaning of meals among her family and friends. Apparently, she found time to become a gourmet cook!
I do need to explain in this review that I have not yet been able to see Kate Winslet's 2023 feature film, Lee, which Winslet describes as a long-time passion project. So far, that UK-produced film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in late 2023 and has yet to be distributed in the US. However, I do already have a copy of what has been described as Winslet's companion volume, the 2023 coffee-table-sized Lee Miller: Photographs. Winslet wrote the Foreword. And I mention that to say: Frankly, if I had started learning about Lee Miller with that 2023 book, I would have been completely at sea in understanding her life.
So, I am 5-star thankful for Carolyn Burke's foundational biography (I could describe it as "exhaustive" but that sounds like a criticism).
And, before I close this review, I have to admit that I was disappointed that this book has less than 70 pages about her life during World War II, which really is the reason we all are fascinated with Miller today. Yes, her relationships and collaborations with a wide array of famous artists are intriguing and, yes, she was a force of nature in the world of high fashion—but it is her wartime photography, and especially her photography from the discovery of Holocaust death camps, that have made her such a memorable figure to this day.
So, for me, next up will be Lee Miller's War, a book also compiled by Antony Penrose. And, now, thanks to Burke, I'll understand the context.
In fact, there are dozens and dozens of haunting scenes in Burke's book—nearly all of them sketched vividly but so concisely that they left me wanting more. Among them: Deep in the post-WWII section of this book, Burke describes how Miller managed to travel in the "Red" zone after the war and made her way across Transylvania and into the Romanian city of Oradea. In my own journalistic career, I was one of the first American journalists to reach Oradea after it was a key to sparking the Romanian Revolution in late 1989. As I read that passage, I thought: Wow! She understood why it was so important to visit Oradea even in 1946! I would easily read an entire book about her travels "behind the Iron Curtain" in that immediate post-war period. Maybe some publisher will release yet another book just about that part of her life. I'll buy it!
I would not want to even attempt judgments on Miller's choices about the more controversial chapters of her life—but I can affirm that, based on my own lifetime dedication to the values of journalism, she was both a courageous pioneer in our shared vocation and she remains a powerful inspiration to this day.
I am giving this 2007 biography of Lee Miller 5 stars—rating it very highly, just as many critics raved about the book when it first appeared. And, even though it was not the book I expected to read, I am glad that it was my in-depth introduction to Miller's life—so that the other books I plan to read about her in 2024 make more sense.
If you are learning about this exceptional journalist, visual artist and all-around cultural "defiant spirit," then welcome to the kaleidoscope that was Lee Miller's 70 years on this planet.
Her Wikipedia entry begins: "Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller, aka Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), was an American photographer and photojournalist." But that's like saying Mark Twain was an American author or that Lucille Ball was a comic actress. So, how does any author even begin to unpack a life with as many facets as Miller's explosive career? Well, biographer Carolyn Burke clearly likes the phrase "defiant spirit," two words that I circled on a page fairly late in her book so that I could recall those words for this review—and then I found the phrase again in the book's final paragraph.
Burke's biography could have been titled: Defiant Spirit—a Life of Lee Miller
What Burke does document repeatedly is this truth: Miller lived her life as if she was determined to plunge through every social, cultural and artistic barrier she encountered. And, even though I am fascinated with her life as a life-long journalist myself, I feel incapable of even suggesting what to think of some chapters of her life.
How did Burke address the most startling chapters? She exhaustively researched them and then wrote about them in plain, clear language—reporting usually without commentary on what unfolded.
What do I mean by startling?
Well, Miller became a photographer because her father was fascinated with the medium and introduced her to it as a little girl—and through her youth—by making many nude studies of her that he proudly displayed to family and friends. And that Miller displayed as well. Even in her childhood, her father trained the girl how to run a darkroom, developing the prints they took together—and eventually her own photographs as well. In fact, one of her requests as a child was for a chemistry set of her own so she could further study the basis of photography.
Or consider: Mid-way through this biography, there's a chapter that describes Pablo Picasso's creation of a series of nude paintings of Miller, including one famous painting in the series that highlights Miller's vagina shaped by the artist to suggest an eye. Burke tells us that Picasso intended this as a visual metaphor for the lens of Miller's camera and a key to understanding her approach to sexuality. Apparently, both of them felt it was a valuable visual insight and, once again, both were proud of the series.
I think that's why Burke keeps using that phrase "defiant spirit." It's almost as though Miller embraced crashing through taboos and welcomed public discussions of issues that today are hotly debated among cultural critics but—back during the course of her own life—were so startling that apparently the rest of the journalistic world simply overlooked them.
All that has changed over the past couple of decades, when the world seems ready and eager to explore her life and a flood of books about Miller have cascaded from publishing houses. When one noted art magazine recently was asked to recommend a first book about Lee Miller—the result was an article explaining that readers should begin by reading five books about her. That list of five includes another shocker: A cookbook! Well, at least a book about Lee Miller's relationship to food, complete with recipes, and the meaning of meals among her family and friends. Apparently, she found time to become a gourmet cook!
I do need to explain in this review that I have not yet been able to see Kate Winslet's 2023 feature film, Lee, which Winslet describes as a long-time passion project. So far, that UK-produced film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in late 2023 and has yet to be distributed in the US. However, I do already have a copy of what has been described as Winslet's companion volume, the 2023 coffee-table-sized Lee Miller: Photographs. Winslet wrote the Foreword. And I mention that to say: Frankly, if I had started learning about Lee Miller with that 2023 book, I would have been completely at sea in understanding her life.
So, I am 5-star thankful for Carolyn Burke's foundational biography (I could describe it as "exhaustive" but that sounds like a criticism).
And, before I close this review, I have to admit that I was disappointed that this book has less than 70 pages about her life during World War II, which really is the reason we all are fascinated with Miller today. Yes, her relationships and collaborations with a wide array of famous artists are intriguing and, yes, she was a force of nature in the world of high fashion—but it is her wartime photography, and especially her photography from the discovery of Holocaust death camps, that have made her such a memorable figure to this day.
So, for me, next up will be Lee Miller's War, a book also compiled by Antony Penrose. And, now, thanks to Burke, I'll understand the context.
In fact, there are dozens and dozens of haunting scenes in Burke's book—nearly all of them sketched vividly but so concisely that they left me wanting more. Among them: Deep in the post-WWII section of this book, Burke describes how Miller managed to travel in the "Red" zone after the war and made her way across Transylvania and into the Romanian city of Oradea. In my own journalistic career, I was one of the first American journalists to reach Oradea after it was a key to sparking the Romanian Revolution in late 1989. As I read that passage, I thought: Wow! She understood why it was so important to visit Oradea even in 1946! I would easily read an entire book about her travels "behind the Iron Curtain" in that immediate post-war period. Maybe some publisher will release yet another book just about that part of her life. I'll buy it!
I would not want to even attempt judgments on Miller's choices about the more controversial chapters of her life—but I can affirm that, based on my own lifetime dedication to the values of journalism, she was both a courageous pioneer in our shared vocation and she remains a powerful inspiration to this day.
January 15, 2008
Still finishing this (about 20 pages to go), but I can only recommend this as a tub or beach read. In the first place, Miller was a remarkably captivating personality and an exceptional photo-journalist, but she was no pioneering figure of 20th Century art and photography. She was lazy, opportunistic, derivative and something of a gadfly socially and professionally. Her pre-WWII work is often beautiful (Cf her Egyptian period), and she was a justifiably popular fashion and portrait photographer. But her attempts at Surrealism are bogged down in the literal and rarely, if ever, manage to evoke an self-contained narrative. Perhaps this is why so many of her WWII images are her best and most resonant, because the sheer horror and scope of the War forced her to trust her objective and very intelligent eye. After the war, she never really adjusted to her life either privately or professionally. But as her doctor (from whom she sought treatment to manage her depression) said to her: '...we cannot keep the world permanently at war just to provide you with entertainment.'
The second reason that I cannot recommend this as a serious biography of Miller is that while Carolyn Burke is clearly an exhaustive researcher and takes great pains to connect the development of Miller's work with her life, she doesn't seem to know or be interested in photography. She doesn't seem to understand the photographic process and isn't always very adept at communicating Miller's images. This is a pity as several are discussed, but not reproduced. Equally, Burke repeatedly implies she enjoyed some kind of insider status as Miller's biographer. Fair enough, if she really knew her. However, I can't help but think that if Burke had, she would have been able to examine Miller's life and career more intelligently. Instead, one is irritatingly confronted with often unsubstantiated and random references to Miller's sex life and drinking habits. As the biography progresses, these references appear less as comments in context, and increasingly as creepy, and frankly, bitchy assumptions.
ETA: Finished this now. Fascinating woman, but wow. Her later life was really a waste of her gifts. So apparently spent it largely in entertaining at Farley Farm. And no, Burke apparently did not know Miller and met her only once by accident in Venice near the end of her life. Figures.
The second reason that I cannot recommend this as a serious biography of Miller is that while Carolyn Burke is clearly an exhaustive researcher and takes great pains to connect the development of Miller's work with her life, she doesn't seem to know or be interested in photography. She doesn't seem to understand the photographic process and isn't always very adept at communicating Miller's images. This is a pity as several are discussed, but not reproduced. Equally, Burke repeatedly implies she enjoyed some kind of insider status as Miller's biographer. Fair enough, if she really knew her. However, I can't help but think that if Burke had, she would have been able to examine Miller's life and career more intelligently. Instead, one is irritatingly confronted with often unsubstantiated and random references to Miller's sex life and drinking habits. As the biography progresses, these references appear less as comments in context, and increasingly as creepy, and frankly, bitchy assumptions.
ETA: Finished this now. Fascinating woman, but wow. Her later life was really a waste of her gifts. So apparently spent it largely in entertaining at Farley Farm. And no, Burke apparently did not know Miller and met her only once by accident in Venice near the end of her life. Figures.
January 8, 2021
This biography worried me a little as I began it, but it sure got rolling, and I have taken it in fitfully so I intend to go back and study more closely the last half. But in general, my interest in Lee Miller was piqued reading a biography of Man Ray. She was the most important love in his life, and he never found a connection like her afterwards. Sure, she was an intriguing, androgynous model, which is what one takes interest in first, and she found her home among artists, living unconventionally, and enjoyed the freedom of their company. But her biography is dominated throughout by a terrible shadow only in hinted at in the book about him, that book mentioned little more about her, besides her role in his life as paramour, and then shortly after, the scandal of a tragedy which involved her affair with a married man, and that man's wife committing suicide as a result. She was painted as a sort of talented but cruel coquette, yet again.
Her biography reveals so much more. It begins with a horrific sexual assault, when she was only 7 years old, by a family friend given care of her over a prolonged season. As often happens with this, a life of body image issues ensued, and difficulty having deep intimacy and lasting relationships shaped her existence for life. When one is sexually abused at such an early age, people, especially men, quickly fall into two categories - those who want you, and everyone else. When a man showed her sexual attention, it was as though a fuse on a bomb was lit, and their disappearance from her life was almost inevitable. This really decided the kind of person who would be in her life, and it became a mixture of hard men who wouldn't threaten her with intimacy, and artistic souls who could touch that part of her but couldn't possibly make her stay. This formula has classically been presented before as a 'muse' dynamic, but typically disregards the psyche of the muse, which here is a tale of overcoming trauma, and requires full recognition of psychic autonomy to even understand.
Her family consulted alienists and tried to help the child with her body issues by photographing her constantly, which seemed to help as she enjoyed staging the poses for them. But it did not cure but the hot, sudden rage that so often appeared within her afterwards, something that never really went away. The love of photography led her to comfortably enter the work of a model, but her father continued to have her pose nude for him well into college, having her bring along her school friends as well... another weirdness that is not very well understood, as to what exactly was happening there. She was rather lonely in college, frequently expelled for drinking, sleeping with nearly everyone she could, male and female, and this cemented an outsider reputation she would have her whole life. When fiancée tragically drowned on a boating excursion, she was violently blamed for the death by his mother. These are just a few of the constant brushes with tragedy... any one or two could have traumatized a person for life, enough raw material for a biography. But these are just the first of a constant chain of troubles for this woman. Her life story almost makes one believe that some are chosen to witness the harder side of humanity. It's no wonder she found respite and some understanding among the Surrealists whose work blended art with the vision of a more just society... though not all of them had remotely the same vision. Breton was a creep himself, preferring young girls, and famous for saying that a woman's orgasm doesn't matter. What a moron. This comment relates to the possibility that Miller did not have normal sexual response with men, another very common result of sexual abuse.
A rotating dichotomy of puritanical and libertine, these horrors were blended with what many outsiders saw, even with envy, as a charmed and comfortable life with ample money and suitors - beautiful boyish features, the model's life, a string of prominent, famous, and wealthy lovers, plus all the opium and champagne she could want, which undoubtedly turned her emotional life into a hellish roller coaster. Obviously, her inner life would have been something other than floating lightly over the hardships of the world.
Her transformation, by the author's estimation, began when she stopped being a model and seized her power by moving behind the camera. Her skills had developed living with Man Ray, but that was a chrysalis, stepping out on her own into the world was the complete manifestation of her self possession. So when the Second World War came along, she did something few might have expected. Except perhaps perhaps for her artist compatriots, among whom many were veterans of the first Great War, the Lost Generation. It's not really a surprise she found good company among highly creative, intelligent people who had also suffered the traumas, with the addictions and instabilities that so typically result from strife, and she already had a macabre stomach for odd images, especially medical photography... so she became a war photographer, and her journalism took her right into the heart of darkness. She was one of the first witnesses to the horrors of some of the German concentration camps, right as their survivors were liberated. She didn't only document the aftermath of the holocaust, but also the utter destruction of the German cities, and the suffering of its civilian populations under the duress of indiscriminate bombings. The depopulation campaigns of Churchill were designed to drive German working class families into homelessness, to slow down wartime production, so not only were buildings and churches and schools flattened, but she with her mixed experience witnessed starvation, unchecked street violence and the other living conditions women endured trying to get by in a world completely collapsed on itself. Much of warfare is economic, even today.
Some have pontificated that guilt over her privilege and desirability drove her to take such a horrible job, but reading her story, I think she went into that wilderness in search of some kind of reflection of how she felt inside, as a human being. This resulted in one of the most legendary pictures she took, perhaps the most extraordinary selfie in history - posing in a sardonic odalisque in the bathtub in Hitler's bunker, making use of his scrub brush. Antifascism has plenty of pin-ups, arguably the pin-up is the result of antifascism... but she was something else - the tomboy with a fearless eye, the socialite that had become, like Dante's Virgil, a witness and guide. There are some people you just don't want to mess with, because you might just create someone who will stop at nothing, fearing no darkness, to show the world what you are.
Perhaps it was the terror and suffering that she lived with all her life, that made her a willing witness to the reality of human wastefulness, or this is why she recognized its importance, and the need to witness what most people want censored and washed away. We live in a world where child abuse is still a taboo topic, where war correspondents are being embedded to hide the strife, and even now, government censors are preventing the media from sharing hospital documentation of Covid, which is only fueling the tragedy of the denial of its existence, and making our healer's work so much more difficult by hiding its reality. Imagine if Americans chose to hide the Holocaust, instead of sending brave warriors like Miller to make sure it was never forgotten.
The string of awful on record in her own life, and I mean if you believe in luck then she is a poster child for the most mixed kind... hints at the day to day things she must have endured never even made it into the book, things few could understand even if they were. There is no other word than torture to describe early parts of her life, and perhaps it takes a torture survivor to have the strength to make art out of suffering in the first place. To be able see how cancellation of the Other creates endless cascading suffering - the German attempt to cancel the Jews, the Allied cancellation of the Germans. Men cancel women. War cancels all of life. Abuse of children cancels their hopes of easy love and success.
Still, true love comes only to the brave, and a few people in her life like Man Ray did not see a possession and then a tragic loss, but instead a powerful force of nature, a combination of life's circumstances and the refusal to be buried by them... and both were transformed into incredible, memorable, living works of art. They shared a sweet-fierce dichotomy. It was clear from his biography, that her company, not the loss of her, shaped his existence and all for the better. They didn't lounge around as socialites and climbers, though easily that could have been their life, instead they worked together tirelessly in studio service. They taught each other how to be free, how to see and experiment, and how to love during wartime... both parted from each other deeply moved, and kept the memory as a treasure... two people who had in their own struggles found very few human beings with whom to really connect. Two people who had changed their names as an afterthought to living a life so far from where they had each begun, all out of inevitable necessity.
This is a parable about life for anyone, of any description, who tries to continue to be human under inhuman conditions, and beyond this, to teach the value of optimism or at least the absurd in life, no matter how much suffering is imposed on you. This is the tremendous lesson of the war years that educated a generation in the value of art as being as important as water and bread to a society, and showed our society that without challenging art and intelligence guiding our more difficult questions, depravity and dehumanization of the Other is never far away. Bread and water is not enough, let them have roses too. The result was the creation of witnesses on a deeper level of the other human beings around them. The kind of people who are not born, life must make them this way.
Miller is arguably the more powerful, if comparison is needed... for she sought and found the humanity of supposedly sworn enemies in her portraits... and her work is almost a study of enlightened indiscrimination; all that suffering, hidden in all her strange beauty, left us with the legacy of an incredible humanist. The sheer pain in reading her story is probably why she is less well known, and of course, sexism paints her as a floozy whose looks and promiscuity left a trail of sad men in the dust. But it took a real artist to love her. She's an example of what kind of life is possible when it just insists on dealing one bad card after another, or possibly worse, to constantly hand you both sorts of luck in abundance. To be privileged and also a torture survivor, talk about being alienated from both the typical polarities. But it also shows you what to do, if by some misfortune you have to live as a survivor, by offering a roadmap - ceaseless work, tireless effort, a constant witness of life and a fearless eye to look at forsaken places and help those unseen by popular tastes... this is a path that exists to sustain those who have not been handed a blank slate with which to create themselves. Some are handed a book of their life already blackened by redactions, editorials, and commentaries to the point of almost obliterating the prose at hand. You can still work. You can still offer something to people, and have something to live for. The amount of herself that she must have hidden away, just to function each... exacerbated by the skin deep view that defined her to society, drove her deep into the wilderness of human experience. She returned with concrete evidence of things that are still being actively denied by conspiracy theorists even today, despite all the documentation, just as she was denied even as she was documented. She lived out the denials of others, and it's why she made these documents that no one wants to look at, or even believe are possible. Perhaps stories like this can happen in no other way.
She deserves credit for inspiring greatness in others... and it is possible she wouldn't have realized that she was an intellectual, creative, transcendent being, so much more than a woman and object of desire, if the adoring eye of art had not turned upon and released her from all the ordinary social obligations, forever.
Her biography reveals so much more. It begins with a horrific sexual assault, when she was only 7 years old, by a family friend given care of her over a prolonged season. As often happens with this, a life of body image issues ensued, and difficulty having deep intimacy and lasting relationships shaped her existence for life. When one is sexually abused at such an early age, people, especially men, quickly fall into two categories - those who want you, and everyone else. When a man showed her sexual attention, it was as though a fuse on a bomb was lit, and their disappearance from her life was almost inevitable. This really decided the kind of person who would be in her life, and it became a mixture of hard men who wouldn't threaten her with intimacy, and artistic souls who could touch that part of her but couldn't possibly make her stay. This formula has classically been presented before as a 'muse' dynamic, but typically disregards the psyche of the muse, which here is a tale of overcoming trauma, and requires full recognition of psychic autonomy to even understand.
Her family consulted alienists and tried to help the child with her body issues by photographing her constantly, which seemed to help as she enjoyed staging the poses for them. But it did not cure but the hot, sudden rage that so often appeared within her afterwards, something that never really went away. The love of photography led her to comfortably enter the work of a model, but her father continued to have her pose nude for him well into college, having her bring along her school friends as well... another weirdness that is not very well understood, as to what exactly was happening there. She was rather lonely in college, frequently expelled for drinking, sleeping with nearly everyone she could, male and female, and this cemented an outsider reputation she would have her whole life. When fiancée tragically drowned on a boating excursion, she was violently blamed for the death by his mother. These are just a few of the constant brushes with tragedy... any one or two could have traumatized a person for life, enough raw material for a biography. But these are just the first of a constant chain of troubles for this woman. Her life story almost makes one believe that some are chosen to witness the harder side of humanity. It's no wonder she found respite and some understanding among the Surrealists whose work blended art with the vision of a more just society... though not all of them had remotely the same vision. Breton was a creep himself, preferring young girls, and famous for saying that a woman's orgasm doesn't matter. What a moron. This comment relates to the possibility that Miller did not have normal sexual response with men, another very common result of sexual abuse.
A rotating dichotomy of puritanical and libertine, these horrors were blended with what many outsiders saw, even with envy, as a charmed and comfortable life with ample money and suitors - beautiful boyish features, the model's life, a string of prominent, famous, and wealthy lovers, plus all the opium and champagne she could want, which undoubtedly turned her emotional life into a hellish roller coaster. Obviously, her inner life would have been something other than floating lightly over the hardships of the world.
Her transformation, by the author's estimation, began when she stopped being a model and seized her power by moving behind the camera. Her skills had developed living with Man Ray, but that was a chrysalis, stepping out on her own into the world was the complete manifestation of her self possession. So when the Second World War came along, she did something few might have expected. Except perhaps perhaps for her artist compatriots, among whom many were veterans of the first Great War, the Lost Generation. It's not really a surprise she found good company among highly creative, intelligent people who had also suffered the traumas, with the addictions and instabilities that so typically result from strife, and she already had a macabre stomach for odd images, especially medical photography... so she became a war photographer, and her journalism took her right into the heart of darkness. She was one of the first witnesses to the horrors of some of the German concentration camps, right as their survivors were liberated. She didn't only document the aftermath of the holocaust, but also the utter destruction of the German cities, and the suffering of its civilian populations under the duress of indiscriminate bombings. The depopulation campaigns of Churchill were designed to drive German working class families into homelessness, to slow down wartime production, so not only were buildings and churches and schools flattened, but she with her mixed experience witnessed starvation, unchecked street violence and the other living conditions women endured trying to get by in a world completely collapsed on itself. Much of warfare is economic, even today.
Some have pontificated that guilt over her privilege and desirability drove her to take such a horrible job, but reading her story, I think she went into that wilderness in search of some kind of reflection of how she felt inside, as a human being. This resulted in one of the most legendary pictures she took, perhaps the most extraordinary selfie in history - posing in a sardonic odalisque in the bathtub in Hitler's bunker, making use of his scrub brush. Antifascism has plenty of pin-ups, arguably the pin-up is the result of antifascism... but she was something else - the tomboy with a fearless eye, the socialite that had become, like Dante's Virgil, a witness and guide. There are some people you just don't want to mess with, because you might just create someone who will stop at nothing, fearing no darkness, to show the world what you are.
Perhaps it was the terror and suffering that she lived with all her life, that made her a willing witness to the reality of human wastefulness, or this is why she recognized its importance, and the need to witness what most people want censored and washed away. We live in a world where child abuse is still a taboo topic, where war correspondents are being embedded to hide the strife, and even now, government censors are preventing the media from sharing hospital documentation of Covid, which is only fueling the tragedy of the denial of its existence, and making our healer's work so much more difficult by hiding its reality. Imagine if Americans chose to hide the Holocaust, instead of sending brave warriors like Miller to make sure it was never forgotten.
The string of awful on record in her own life, and I mean if you believe in luck then she is a poster child for the most mixed kind... hints at the day to day things she must have endured never even made it into the book, things few could understand even if they were. There is no other word than torture to describe early parts of her life, and perhaps it takes a torture survivor to have the strength to make art out of suffering in the first place. To be able see how cancellation of the Other creates endless cascading suffering - the German attempt to cancel the Jews, the Allied cancellation of the Germans. Men cancel women. War cancels all of life. Abuse of children cancels their hopes of easy love and success.
Still, true love comes only to the brave, and a few people in her life like Man Ray did not see a possession and then a tragic loss, but instead a powerful force of nature, a combination of life's circumstances and the refusal to be buried by them... and both were transformed into incredible, memorable, living works of art. They shared a sweet-fierce dichotomy. It was clear from his biography, that her company, not the loss of her, shaped his existence and all for the better. They didn't lounge around as socialites and climbers, though easily that could have been their life, instead they worked together tirelessly in studio service. They taught each other how to be free, how to see and experiment, and how to love during wartime... both parted from each other deeply moved, and kept the memory as a treasure... two people who had in their own struggles found very few human beings with whom to really connect. Two people who had changed their names as an afterthought to living a life so far from where they had each begun, all out of inevitable necessity.
This is a parable about life for anyone, of any description, who tries to continue to be human under inhuman conditions, and beyond this, to teach the value of optimism or at least the absurd in life, no matter how much suffering is imposed on you. This is the tremendous lesson of the war years that educated a generation in the value of art as being as important as water and bread to a society, and showed our society that without challenging art and intelligence guiding our more difficult questions, depravity and dehumanization of the Other is never far away. Bread and water is not enough, let them have roses too. The result was the creation of witnesses on a deeper level of the other human beings around them. The kind of people who are not born, life must make them this way.
Miller is arguably the more powerful, if comparison is needed... for she sought and found the humanity of supposedly sworn enemies in her portraits... and her work is almost a study of enlightened indiscrimination; all that suffering, hidden in all her strange beauty, left us with the legacy of an incredible humanist. The sheer pain in reading her story is probably why she is less well known, and of course, sexism paints her as a floozy whose looks and promiscuity left a trail of sad men in the dust. But it took a real artist to love her. She's an example of what kind of life is possible when it just insists on dealing one bad card after another, or possibly worse, to constantly hand you both sorts of luck in abundance. To be privileged and also a torture survivor, talk about being alienated from both the typical polarities. But it also shows you what to do, if by some misfortune you have to live as a survivor, by offering a roadmap - ceaseless work, tireless effort, a constant witness of life and a fearless eye to look at forsaken places and help those unseen by popular tastes... this is a path that exists to sustain those who have not been handed a blank slate with which to create themselves. Some are handed a book of their life already blackened by redactions, editorials, and commentaries to the point of almost obliterating the prose at hand. You can still work. You can still offer something to people, and have something to live for. The amount of herself that she must have hidden away, just to function each... exacerbated by the skin deep view that defined her to society, drove her deep into the wilderness of human experience. She returned with concrete evidence of things that are still being actively denied by conspiracy theorists even today, despite all the documentation, just as she was denied even as she was documented. She lived out the denials of others, and it's why she made these documents that no one wants to look at, or even believe are possible. Perhaps stories like this can happen in no other way.
She deserves credit for inspiring greatness in others... and it is possible she wouldn't have realized that she was an intellectual, creative, transcendent being, so much more than a woman and object of desire, if the adoring eye of art had not turned upon and released her from all the ordinary social obligations, forever.
December 20, 2013
This was assigned reading for a book club. We found the author biased and borderline misogynistic. Where no facts were available, Ms. Burke filled in with assumption and bias. I found the book reveled in Ms. Millers tragedies, exploiting her family and youth to support the authors agenda. The author is not a psychologist or psychoanalyst, yet proceeds with deep psychoanalysis. The author does not cite any authorities or primary sources to support her thesis. If the moribund and dark tales are all true, then document it properly. Redemptive qualities? This was an exciting time in the arts and Lee was in the the midst of it all. The history is undeniably interesting. Aside from the history, this is just a giant gossip session about a moderately exceptional person.
June 29, 2025
Model, muse, photographer, war correspondent - Lee Miller wore many hats and lived many lives, and along the way intersected with major figures in the Surrealist movement.
Lee Miller had the tumultuous sort of life that makes for fascinating reading, and considering I knew very little about her past the famous picture of her bathing in Hitler's bathtub, everything I read was a revelation. She worked so closely with more prominent artists of the Surrealist movement as both model and collaborator that it astounds me how thoroughly she was subsumed by the shadows they cast - in Man Ray's Wikipedia page, for example, she apparently justifies only a couple of lines about their work together.
You feel that in her life you get a good glimpse of the changing social mores of the early and mid-20th century - how she morphs from an outrageous Bohemian at the start to an establishment figure by the end says a lot. The chapters on Miller's time working as a war correspondent were especially fascinating, highlighting how inadequately the camera served to separate her from the atrocities she photographed - how it made for more impactful photographs, but how deleterious an effect it had on her as well. I appreciated the plentiful photos by her and of her scattered through the book, and would have even liked to see more.
However, I do feel that the author does not do a great job of exploring the interiority of Lee Miller, maybe because Miller herself ensured that it was nearly inaccessible. Why does she become interested in what she does, why does she marry who and when she does, why does she pursue the careers that she does? I would have appreciated more insight, or even just more speculation. Without such musings, biographies can become lists.
Lee Miller had the tumultuous sort of life that makes for fascinating reading, and considering I knew very little about her past the famous picture of her bathing in Hitler's bathtub, everything I read was a revelation. She worked so closely with more prominent artists of the Surrealist movement as both model and collaborator that it astounds me how thoroughly she was subsumed by the shadows they cast - in Man Ray's Wikipedia page, for example, she apparently justifies only a couple of lines about their work together.
You feel that in her life you get a good glimpse of the changing social mores of the early and mid-20th century - how she morphs from an outrageous Bohemian at the start to an establishment figure by the end says a lot. The chapters on Miller's time working as a war correspondent were especially fascinating, highlighting how inadequately the camera served to separate her from the atrocities she photographed - how it made for more impactful photographs, but how deleterious an effect it had on her as well. I appreciated the plentiful photos by her and of her scattered through the book, and would have even liked to see more.
However, I do feel that the author does not do a great job of exploring the interiority of Lee Miller, maybe because Miller herself ensured that it was nearly inaccessible. Why does she become interested in what she does, why does she marry who and when she does, why does she pursue the careers that she does? I would have appreciated more insight, or even just more speculation. Without such musings, biographies can become lists.
February 2, 2024
After reading a few fascinating articles about Ms. Miller, I picked up her only child's biography of his mother called, "The Many Lives of Lee Miller," by Antony Penrose. It was really good and furthered my interest in his mother.
I just finished, "Lee Miller, a Life," by Carolyn Burke and it is a much more comprehensive look at this amazing woman who started off as a model, moved to France during the twenties and thirties and was a big part of the Surrealist's movement of the era. She continued to model, and then became a photojournalist, and covered the war, right up front with many of the soldiers. Her photographs of the concentration camps are simply bone chilling. After the war, she visited the countries that the Soviets' controlled and drew a stark contrast between the eastern Soviet countries like Poland and and the western democracies like Great Britain. She took photographs for "Vogue," accompanied by insightful, shocking stories about fashion, art, and the war.
In many ways one might say she lived many lives, was sexually promiscuous, travelled much of the world and lived the life (lives) she wanted.
I just finished, "Lee Miller, a Life," by Carolyn Burke and it is a much more comprehensive look at this amazing woman who started off as a model, moved to France during the twenties and thirties and was a big part of the Surrealist's movement of the era. She continued to model, and then became a photojournalist, and covered the war, right up front with many of the soldiers. Her photographs of the concentration camps are simply bone chilling. After the war, she visited the countries that the Soviets' controlled and drew a stark contrast between the eastern Soviet countries like Poland and and the western democracies like Great Britain. She took photographs for "Vogue," accompanied by insightful, shocking stories about fashion, art, and the war.
In many ways one might say she lived many lives, was sexually promiscuous, travelled much of the world and lived the life (lives) she wanted.
October 10, 2025
Een bijzonder verhaal over een onafhankelijke vrouw die eigenlijk best wel ongelukkig was.
February 27, 2008
Coolest woman ever. Although her surrealist cooking adventures were pure Fanny Craddock.
November 23, 2021
3.5 stars
I had never heard of Lee Miller prior to attending an exhibit of her photos at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. As I proceeded through the exhibit, I was struck by her fascinating life and photos and wanted to learn more. Hence, the purchase of this bio in the bookstore (actually a birthday gift). This carefully researched and beautifully written biography starts off well. Lee Miller packed in a tremendous amount of activity in the first half of her life. The description of her childhood in Poughkeepsie, New York as part of a comfortable but eccentric family was so interesting. She first learns about photography from her father who was an enthusiastic hobbyist. Blessed with great beauty, she models for Vogue, but strives to be behind the camera. She boldly travels to Paris and talks herself into the role of student, model, and lover/muse to the great surrealist photographer, Man Ray. Eventually, she begins her own career as a fashion photographer, portraitist, and photojournalist, taking combat photos and photos of the liberation of the concentration camps. By age forty, Miller is drinking heavily and is losing her looks. Her photography career sputters and then ends. She marries artist Roland Penrose and has a son at age forty but leaves the raising of her son to his nanny. She does develop an interest in gourmet cooking and hangs around with other gourmands, including James Beard. The final third of the book is much less interesting because the last thirty years of her life was so much less interesting, and very sad. Miller suffered horrific sexual trauma in childhood. Her description of her "jitters" was most likely what we would now call PTSD. She thrived during the turmoil of the war but had trouble returning to peacetime. The book includes many photos taken by Lee, Man Ray, and other collaborators. That Miller had great talent as a photographer is evident in the photos, though I longed for even more of them.
I had never heard of Lee Miller prior to attending an exhibit of her photos at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. As I proceeded through the exhibit, I was struck by her fascinating life and photos and wanted to learn more. Hence, the purchase of this bio in the bookstore (actually a birthday gift). This carefully researched and beautifully written biography starts off well. Lee Miller packed in a tremendous amount of activity in the first half of her life. The description of her childhood in Poughkeepsie, New York as part of a comfortable but eccentric family was so interesting. She first learns about photography from her father who was an enthusiastic hobbyist. Blessed with great beauty, she models for Vogue, but strives to be behind the camera. She boldly travels to Paris and talks herself into the role of student, model, and lover/muse to the great surrealist photographer, Man Ray. Eventually, she begins her own career as a fashion photographer, portraitist, and photojournalist, taking combat photos and photos of the liberation of the concentration camps. By age forty, Miller is drinking heavily and is losing her looks. Her photography career sputters and then ends. She marries artist Roland Penrose and has a son at age forty but leaves the raising of her son to his nanny. She does develop an interest in gourmet cooking and hangs around with other gourmands, including James Beard. The final third of the book is much less interesting because the last thirty years of her life was so much less interesting, and very sad. Miller suffered horrific sexual trauma in childhood. Her description of her "jitters" was most likely what we would now call PTSD. She thrived during the turmoil of the war but had trouble returning to peacetime. The book includes many photos taken by Lee, Man Ray, and other collaborators. That Miller had great talent as a photographer is evident in the photos, though I longed for even more of them.
July 19, 2021
I got interested in Lee Miller because I heard a little bit about her on a podcast and that Kate Winslet is going to play her in an upcoming biopic. She's a really interesting woman with a really interesting life, but this biography was a little more dry and academic than I was looking for personally. Also it's frustrating when it refers to an image and then the image isn't there! And I know it's expensive to print images, but, like, argh. Anyway, still excited for the movie but wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to the layperson. It was kind of a slog for me to get through.
September 12, 2014
Although I was keen to read about the enigmatic Lee Miller, whose photographs include images of her coterie of fabulous artist friends and also harrowing images of WWII, I can't say I finished the book knowing much more about her than I had before I started it. I couldn't really make out anything about who Lee really was as a person except that she was a rather talented photographer and muse to Vogue and the Surrealist artists, and she was also a beautiful free spirit, which explains her hold over people like Man Ray and Roland Penrose. Aside from her sexual energy and beauty, what other affect did she have on people? How was she as a friend, a sister, a daughter, or as a fellow artist? Although I admire her talent and her desire to live in a very modern and unabashed way—namely, to go through life living like a man--I found that there wasn't much about Lee I could identify with, which I suppose made it hard for me to like her. Also, I got bored about half way through the book (the fact that this coincided with the end of Lee's professional life as a photographer and the beginning of her quiet decline into crochety old age wasn't lost on me). It was sad to see her not live up to her full potential during the latter stages of her life; it was as though she was waiting for it to end already (the biographer implies that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and kept her emotions deeply buried after the end of the war). Also, I found it difficult to visualize much of the artwork described in the book and lamented that there weren't more pictures for me to peruse. Often the author would go into great detail about a given photo, and I found it supremely frustrating not to see for myself what she was describing. Overall, a disappointment.
October 12, 2020
An absolutely stunning biography. I wrote my masters thesis on Miller's wartime work, several years before this came out, and went into this biography assuming I knew most everything within. I was completely wrong. Burke's biography not only sheds light on the nook-and-crannies of Miller's life and career, but paints an undiluted portrait of her. Through extensive research and numerous personal interviews, Burke accomplishes what can only be described as THE definitive biography of the artist.
December 19, 2011
Glorious and dark portrait of an extremely engaging woman, as well as an amazing glimpse at the early part of the 20th century. Miss Miller turned the light on in the dark room, creating the famous "solarization" technique so often credited to Man Ray (one of her many intriguing lovers). She was part of Picasso's inner circle and one of the greatest war photographers ever. I love her, love this book.
March 1, 2013
I love biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, what have you. And while I may have been interested in learning more about Miller's life, I couldn't work my way through this book. Every time I picked it up, I inevitably would start to drift off to sleep after the third page. Burke seems to be an excellent biographer, but the story she presented was too detail heavy, at least for me. It's sad, really, because Miller seemed to be quite the character.
January 8, 2021
3.5? This is a comprehensive biography in that it covers the full length of Miller’s life (or lives, as another biography is more accurately titled). But, it feels light on the flavour and essence of who Miller truly was - in spite of Burke’s best efforts. With clear affection for her subject and a touching personal anecdote of a late-in-life meeting with Miller, Burke attempts to stay true to the timed trajectory without revealing her inner life. I believe that Burke unearthed new details of Miller’s (especially early) life on publication, but there wasn’t much here that was new to me, often raising rather than answering tantalising questions.
I also struggled with the litany of names that were sometimes unexplained and hard to keep track of (though I often have this issue with factual biographies and epochal non-fiction, so may be a reader issue), along with references dropped in as though they’d already been covered but were in fact being mentioned for the first time. Perhaps an editing issue - it’s a lengthy book. Then there are those treated almost cursorily or abruptly dispatched - I know Nusch Eluard was important to Miller from other sources and she is covered here but at a surface level; we never discover the fate of Aziz Eloui Bey or how their continued relationship plays out (Bourke references Miller extending an Egyptian trip to spend more time with him but given their historical relationship, what happened in this visit?). Some of these unanswered questions may be due to lack of empirical sources and Burke’s need to stay close to them.
Miller’s life reads as an improbable fairy tale - if one as told by Angela Carter - to fully honour and reveal the lives she lived, more versions must be written.
I also struggled with the litany of names that were sometimes unexplained and hard to keep track of (though I often have this issue with factual biographies and epochal non-fiction, so may be a reader issue), along with references dropped in as though they’d already been covered but were in fact being mentioned for the first time. Perhaps an editing issue - it’s a lengthy book. Then there are those treated almost cursorily or abruptly dispatched - I know Nusch Eluard was important to Miller from other sources and she is covered here but at a surface level; we never discover the fate of Aziz Eloui Bey or how their continued relationship plays out (Bourke references Miller extending an Egyptian trip to spend more time with him but given their historical relationship, what happened in this visit?). Some of these unanswered questions may be due to lack of empirical sources and Burke’s need to stay close to them.
Miller’s life reads as an improbable fairy tale - if one as told by Angela Carter - to fully honour and reveal the lives she lived, more versions must be written.
March 20, 2017
Pros: This is an amazingly well researched book about an incredible life. Applaud Carolyn Burke's effort and work in turning the complex life of Lee Miller into a readable account of Miller's explosive, damaging and yet propelling journey and impact she had on society. Extremely inspiring and undeniably sad in places. Was left with a feeling of voyeurism and amazement that one person can live life like Lee Miller did. It would be interesting to read Margaret Bourke-White's biography, as they were contemporaries and competitors. Loved the photography, photos and recipes that were included. Also well written is Lee Miller's important people in her orbit, including her family (especially her relationship with her father, her two husbands, Aziz and Roland, and of course, Picasso, Man Ray, and finally, some of her true girl friends.) Appreciate the quotes, the details of the times and contrasting moods that Miller projected, including the reality of her drinking. Interesting facts about Miller include her freedom of body, her compassion and her journalistic writing ability. This is not an easy read, on several levels, but well worth the effort. Would have loved to have known Miller, had a cognac with her and listen to some of her stories and/or eaten her gourmet meals.
Cons: A bit too in-depth for me at times, including Miller's early life of theater, multiple people surrounding her during her Surrealism period and gourmet cooking adventures. Also felt that Burke really admired Miller (how can one not?) but was not impartial or objective as she could have been. (Especially noted with the discussion of possible Post Traumatic Stress Disorder -- or was it even more pronounced with postpartum depression that could have been layer on but wasn't even mentioned as a possibility).
Cover Art: 5 out of 5
Cons: A bit too in-depth for me at times, including Miller's early life of theater, multiple people surrounding her during her Surrealism period and gourmet cooking adventures. Also felt that Burke really admired Miller (how can one not?) but was not impartial or objective as she could have been. (Especially noted with the discussion of possible Post Traumatic Stress Disorder -- or was it even more pronounced with postpartum depression that could have been layer on but wasn't even mentioned as a possibility).
Cover Art: 5 out of 5
April 20, 2020
4.5 stars.
This book goes well with The Art of Lee Miller as many of the photographs and works of art aren’t in Carolyn Burke’s book. Lee Millers life was full, so full in-fact that it’s hard to believe one woman lived all the ‘lives’ Lee has, and yet she did. I really admire this woman, born before her time with an eye to the future. She’s complicated, annoying, funny, dangerous and down right talented through and through. I’m not going to describe all the facets of her life, read this book and you will find it all in here. Another book you can quickly read about Lee is the novel ‘The Art of Light’. If this book ignites a hunger to find out more about this astonishing woman then it will lead to you to Burke’s.
Burke has detailed Lees life extremely well. A few times though she jumped about with dates near the end and so I had to reread a few paragraphs but over all a fascinating read. I wish (but the book would have been enormous) all the photos and art related to Lee or discussed were shown but I just googled. A must for any fans out there of Lee Miller and a must of all young women to read about a life so illuminating and adventurous, we’d all wish just to have a dash or 2 of it for ourselves.
This book goes well with The Art of Lee Miller as many of the photographs and works of art aren’t in Carolyn Burke’s book. Lee Millers life was full, so full in-fact that it’s hard to believe one woman lived all the ‘lives’ Lee has, and yet she did. I really admire this woman, born before her time with an eye to the future. She’s complicated, annoying, funny, dangerous and down right talented through and through. I’m not going to describe all the facets of her life, read this book and you will find it all in here. Another book you can quickly read about Lee is the novel ‘The Art of Light’. If this book ignites a hunger to find out more about this astonishing woman then it will lead to you to Burke’s.
Burke has detailed Lees life extremely well. A few times though she jumped about with dates near the end and so I had to reread a few paragraphs but over all a fascinating read. I wish (but the book would have been enormous) all the photos and art related to Lee or discussed were shown but I just googled. A must for any fans out there of Lee Miller and a must of all young women to read about a life so illuminating and adventurous, we’d all wish just to have a dash or 2 of it for ourselves.
December 29, 2024
What A Life … But A Complicated And Confounding Read
As a retired journalist and photographer, I wanted to read about Lee Miller, a unique war photographer. She was great, but way more than that.
This book was a tough read because it was exhaustingly detailed, more than necessary to capture Miller’s character but in fairness Miller led a complicated life.
However, just because she lived in Paris awhile and was devoted to the art scene there, it seems unnecessary to burden page after page with French phrases and idioms that could have just as well been in English, at least in an English language edition. Yes, yes the Australian-native author and sometimes university professor speaks French but the incessant usage of French seems like a passive-aggressive brag.
I thought about a 3-star rating because of it - but there is no denying that I learned what I set out to learn. Readers just need to be prepared for what is to come.
As a retired journalist and photographer, I wanted to read about Lee Miller, a unique war photographer. She was great, but way more than that.
This book was a tough read because it was exhaustingly detailed, more than necessary to capture Miller’s character but in fairness Miller led a complicated life.
However, just because she lived in Paris awhile and was devoted to the art scene there, it seems unnecessary to burden page after page with French phrases and idioms that could have just as well been in English, at least in an English language edition. Yes, yes the Australian-native author and sometimes university professor speaks French but the incessant usage of French seems like a passive-aggressive brag.
I thought about a 3-star rating because of it - but there is no denying that I learned what I set out to learn. Readers just need to be prepared for what is to come.
July 11, 2023
A biography, very well researched and documented, of an incredible, stunning woman. Lee Miller was a muse and friend of many artists, a model, an artist in her own right, a war reporter, a famous photographer... finally a wife, mother and host at a very famous house where numerous personas visited.
Amazing person, with a clear lust for life and strength of character. Carolyn Burke does her justice by telling the story of the whole length of her life, in details.
I've known of Lee, of course, after reading this book I feel as if I got to know the real her, at least a little bit. And I was very moved by this biography.
Amazing person, with a clear lust for life and strength of character. Carolyn Burke does her justice by telling the story of the whole length of her life, in details.
I've known of Lee, of course, after reading this book I feel as if I got to know the real her, at least a little bit. And I was very moved by this biography.
February 22, 2021
An excellent biography on an amazing woman. Model, muse, actor, photographer, war correspondent and chef. Contemporary of Picasso, Man Ray, Cocteau and those who lived in Paris in the 20's and early 30's.
To fully appreciate the book you must visit the Lee Miller Archives online to see the photographs described in the book.
To fully appreciate the book you must visit the Lee Miller Archives online to see the photographs described in the book.
November 28, 2023
At times a difficult read, because Miller was often an unhappy person, an alcoholic and survivor of childhood sexual abuse. But a fascinating cast of friends and peers (Man Ray, Picasso, Margaret Bourke-White) keeps this narrative moving and the legacy of work Miller left behind makes the conclusion oddly hopeful. Worthwhile spending some time with the muse who was also an artist.
March 5, 2023
Not only do we get to know the amazing artist Lee Miller, but we also get to travel back in time to the roaring twenties and the turbulent decades that followed & experience it through surrealist eyes. Well written and inspiring on many levels.
July 19, 2017
The definitive biography of Elizabeth/Lee Miller, a complex but fascinating individual.
March 12, 2022
a rich, detailed account of an extraordinary life and of miller's body of work... a perfect read for the now...
March 6, 2023
Lee Miller was extraordinary. This biography is detailed but lacks somehow in giving the feeling of the living spirit of the wonan.
April 2, 2023
As you might expect, the parts where she's a model and muse and then a war correspondent are more interesting than the parts where she devotes herself to cooking.
January 24, 2024
Lots of childhood information that felt unnecessary and voyeuristic
February 11, 2024
Excellent, well researched bio about an extraordinary woman who was ahead of her time. Good narrator. Highly recommended.
Want to read
July 1, 2024779.092 Bur
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