Last Updated on June 10, 2026
Lee Miller was one of the most important photojournalists to have documented the horror and inhumanity of Nazi death camps. But there’s far more to her legacy. Image: U.S. Army Official Photograph, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I recently saw “Lee”, starring Kate Winslet as the lauded WWII photojournalist, former model and surrealist “muse” Lee Miller. It was a solid, if at times aesthetically and narratively un-ambitious, biopic that I generally enjoyed. But while I’m glad the film from debut director Ellen Kuras, which also stars Marion Cotillard and a surprisingly moving Andy Samberg, brought Miller back into the spotlight, it couldn’t possibly capture her complex legacy in a runtime of just under two hours.
So rather than cranking out a traditional film review (something I’ll leave to the critics this time), I thought I’d offer a few brief notes on what you won’t really learn about the American-born photographer by seeing the movie. One I do recommend reserving for the big screen, if you can.
She was an important surrealist photographer herself— not just a muse and model.
One of my early Paris apartments circa 2002 or 2003 was decorated with a few prints of Lee Miller portraits, taken by the American-born surrealist photographer Man Ray. I think I (or perhaps my former partner) found them in a bargain bin at a prints shop, or something akin.
I always wrongly presumed (as so many others have) that before Miller became a celebrated photojournalist at the onset of World War II in 1939— notably exposing some of the Nazi’s atrocities by visiting Dachau and Buchenwald shortly after their liberation— she was primarily a model and muse to surrealist photographers and artists including Man Ray and Jean Cocteau. This is the narrative that’s been propagated for decades, at least in mainstream channels.
And the film by Ellen Kuras doesn’t really succeed in correcting that narrative, unfortunately— despite effectively celebrating Miller as a groundbreaking photojournalist.
Its opening sequences, set in the late 1930s, depict Miller as a hedonistic dilettante who mostly spends her time lounging around semi-nude, drinking and hooking up with various lovers at a villa somewhere in the south of France.
She’s surrounded by characters including surrealist poet Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, as well as the aristocrat and Vogue France editor Solange d’Ayen (played here by Marion Cotillard). It’s also here that she meets future husband Roland Penrose, a surrealist painter and prominent art collector (played by Alexander Skarsgård).
But while Miller did apparently spend a good deal of her early adult years as a semi-libertine (and probably, I’ll surmise, seeded a lifetime alcohol addiction during this phase of her life), to suggest that she only became a serious photographer at the onset of WWII does her a serious disservice.
In fact, as discussed in this interesting episode of podcast The Rest is History, Miller showed an interest in photography from an early age, growing up in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her father Theodore was an amateur photographer, and he let her experiment with his Kodak Brownie in their home darkroom. More disturbingly, Theodore also liked to enlist the young Lee as his model, sometimes photographing her nude.
While Kuras’s “Lee” discusses one aspect of Miller’s horrific sexual abuse— her rape by a family friend when she was only seven years old— it doesn’t divulge that she was also being exploited, and arguably abused, by her own father.
The Paris & New York Years
After becoming star model for a new women’s magazine called Vogue from 1924, Miller moved to Paris in 1929, having contacted Man Ray and demanding that he make her his assistant. Man Ray apparently demurred that he didn’t work with assistants, but on Miller’s insistence, she soon came to work with him in that role, and indeed became one of his primary models.
She ended up opening her own studio in Paris in 1931, located at 12 Rue Victor Considérant in Montparnasse (Metro: Denfert Rochereau or Raspail). You can see a commemorative plaque on the facade there. Her oeuvre of surrealist and fashion photography grew during this period, and she continued experimenting with techniques of solarization and other surrealist methods for playing with light and exposure.
Related at The French Culture Podcast: Josephine Baker, A Queen of Montparnasse
In fact, according to several sources, some of Miller’s photos that used solarization— which produces a sort of dark, deeply defining halo around the edges of a figure— were mistakenly attributed to Man Ray.
Noteworthy surrealist works from Miller include “Self-Portrait” (1932); “Exploding Hand” (from around 1930–1931), which depicts a hand that seems to meld seamlessly into scratched glass; and “Corsetry, Solarised, Vogue Studio, London” (1942).
Contrary to popular belief, Miller did not completely abandon surrealist techniques in favor of (hyperrealist) photojournalism during the 1940s— as the “Corsetry” image from 1942 attests. Clearly, she saw no contradiction or incompatibility in practicing both realism and surrealism in her work.
In 1932, Miller returned to New York, where she opened another studio: reportedly a first for a woman at the time. She consolidated her reputation as a noted portraitist and fashion photographer, contributing to Vogue and numerous other publications.
She was first married to an Egyptian businessman, and produced noteworthy photos in Egypt— including one that may have inspired Rene Magritte.
At least in her early adulthood, Miller’s clear restlessness meant she never stayed for very long in any one place: by 1934, she had married a wealthy Egyptian businessman named Aziz Eloui Bey, and moved to Cairo. There, inspired by the country’s desert landscapes and abandoned villages, she produced important works of photography including her (now-famous) “Portrait of Space” (1937), a photo that transforms the Siwa Oasis into a strangely dreamlike landscape. It was reportedly the inspiration for Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte’s “Le Baiser” (The Kiss, 1938). It’s easy to spot the connection between the two works when comparing them.
By 1937, Miller had once again felt an itch to move on, returning to France where she soon met second husband Roland Penrose. They wouldn’t marry until 1947, when Miller fell pregnant with a son, Antony, and she finally divorced Aziz Eloui Bey.
She didn’t stage a picture of herself in Hitler’s bathtub as a mere publicity stunt or “trophy shot”.
In “Lee”, one especially drawn-out scene shows how Lee Miller and Lifephotojournalist David Scherman managed to visit Hitler’s Munich residence after it had been occupied by Allied forces. They sneak past a few soldiers and find themselves in the bathroom, where Lee promptly undresses and proceeds to run a bath, instructing Scherman to photograph her. Coincidentally and bizarrely, this all happened on April 30th, 1945— the same day Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker.
A piece in the New Yorker partly details Miller’s motivations for taking the bath— and staging the now-famous photograph:
In a letter to her Vogue editor, Miller described Dachau’s “great dusty spaces that had been trampled by so many thousands of condemned feet—feet which ached and shuffled and stamped away the cold and shifted to relieve the pain and finally became useless except to walk them to the death chamber.” In Scherman’s photograph, some of that same dust has tracked from Miller’s boots onto Hitler’s white bathmat.
While the film alludes to all this, showing Miller rubbing her muddy boots on the mat next to the bathtub before she instructs Scherman to snap the shot, it probably should have, in this instance, “hit us over the head” a bit more with her intentions. The scene makes it look (to me) as if Miller were merely staging her bathing ritual as a sort of “victor’s trophy” moment, rather than symbolically (and quite literally) staining Hitler’s pristine bathtub with the suffering of some of his victims at Dachau.
She and Scherman had also, according to an interview with Kate Winslet by Christiane Amanpour in October 2024, not bathed for six weeks when they found Hitler’s Munich residence. So once again, this wasn’t just a publicity stunt, nor merely a way to say a big “F*&! you” to the Fuhrer.
It was also a way, as Winslet notes in the interview, to “wash off off the dirt of Dachau, the horror and evil, in Hitler’s bathtub, to stamp that mud into his girly lemon-yellow bathmat, as she herself described it.”
Too bad all that didn’t come across very clearly in the film— to me, at least. But maybe I was just being dense. I have a doctorate in literature, so that’s a somewhat painful admission to make…
She suffered from post-traumatic stress after the war, and refused to even take family pictures after renouncing the title of “photographer”.
According to The Rest of History podcast episode I mentioned earlier in this post, Miller suffered from post-traumatic stress following her experiences on the frontlines in WWII, and after witnessing the horrors of Nazi barbarism at the camps she visited post-liberation. This, worsened by her growing alcoholism, might at least partly explain why she renounced the title of “photographer” sometime following the war, refusing invitations to expose her work and even to take simple family photos.
Luckily, and as “Lee” succeeds in driving across, her son Antony Penrose made sure her incredible oeuvre, and personal legacy, wouldn’t fall into obscurity. After Miller’s death at 70 from lung cancer, Antony found a large cache of his mother’s photos in 1977, many unpublished. He would go on to publish an authoritative biography of Miller, and head up an archive devoted to her work and legacy.
Her wartime London residence in Hampstead bears a blue commemorative plaque.
Lastly, if you happen to be in North London and want to make a pilgrimage to the Hampstead house where Lee Miller and her husband lived from 1939 to 1947, you can visit it and see the commemorative blue plaque that marks the facade as a place of historic interest.
The house is located at 21 Downshire Hill, London NW3 1NT. The closest London Tube stop is Hampstead (Northern Line), but you can also get off at the Hampstead Heath overground line and walk just a few minutes to the house.
On a personal note, I’m often in the area as my parents-in-law live nearby, so next time I’m in London I’ll be making the brief trek myself to see where Lee and Roland lived through much of the 1940s— and where Roland waited impatiently for Lee to return from her war reporting efforts.
For further reading/viewing:
- Lee Miller: From Vogue to Buchenwald and Dachau (Blind Magazine)
- The Lives of Lee Miller (biography by son Antony Penrose)
- Lee Miller Archive (tons of interesting images to peruse from all periods of Miller’s life and work)
- Lee Miller: The True Story (a Sky Original short doc with interviews from Kate Winslet, Antony Penrose & others)— YouTube
- Surrealist Lee Miller: a longer, illuminating lecture from Antony Penrose that explores Miller’s early photography in depth (YouTube)
Courtney Traub is the Founder and Editor of Paris Unlocked. She’s a longtime Paris resident who now divides her time (as well as she can manage) between the French capital and Norwich, UK. Co-author of the 2012 Michelin Green Guide to Northern France & the Paris Region, she has been interviewed as an expert on Paris and France by the BBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Le Figaro, Matador Network and other publications. Courtney has also written and reported stories for media outlets including Radio France Internationale, The Christian Science Monitor, Women’s Wear Daily and The Associated Press. In addition to going down various rabbit holes of curiosity when it comes to French culture, history, food and art, Courtney is a scholar of literature and cultural history whose essays and reviews have appeared in various forums.
