Lee Miller in Fashion

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. See for example David Hare’s review: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2002/oct/26/art.photography. Richard Calvocoressi’s 2002 publication, Lee Miller: Portraits from Life, was an outcome of this exhibition. Carolyn Burke also contributed an essay to the original catalogue.

2. First published in 2005. The American edition was published as Lee Miller: A Life (Knopf).

3. The last two examples were touring exhibitions with accompanying publications (Haworth-Booth 2007; and Prodger 2011).

4. Hoyningen-Huene, for example, is frequently credited for teaching Miller the finer points of studio lighting.

5. Miller married businessman Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934. After a period of travel from 1937 to 1939, Miller settled in London at the outbreak of World War II with the English surrealist painter Roland Penrose. They met in Paris in 1937 and married in 1947.

6. Miller spent 18 months in the field from July 1944 to February 1946. “Her stories [as Vogue’s war correspondent] were published in British and American Vogue from October 1944 to May 1946” (Calvocoressi 2002: 90). Conekin notes that it was not until, “November 1948 [that] Miller returned to fashion photography in earnest” (p. 185).

7. It is widely acknowledged that up until the last year of her life, Penrose’s relationship with Miller was fraught.

8. Miller’s work was published in each issue from March 1940 to July 1945. Referring to Vogue’s transformation during World War II, legendary Art Director Alexander Liberman notes: “Vogue had evolved from a purely artificial magazine of ladies in attractive clothes to something with a closer relationship to reality” (Angeletti 2006: 142).

9. The impression at times is that they are not entirely different things. See for example her “Fashion self-portrait” for British Vogue, September 1930 and again “Fashion self-portrait” for June 1931 where Miller is both photographer and model (pp. 50–51).

10. Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 1987 to 2007, selected the Lee Miller retrospective held there in 2001. As noted above, Lee Miller: Portraits from Life is a subsequent publication.

11. As suggested by Calvocoressi (2002: 6), the second reason was that Miller did little to promote her work and the third “perhaps, most significant, reason for her neglect is due to the fascination exerted by her unconventional personality.”

12. Interestingly, Zahm’s exhortation echoes advice that Man Ray received from Poiret “‘Make your pictures different,’ Poiret urged Man Ray” (as quoted in Bramly 1998: 37).

13. The images that Maynard references are: Laurence Le Guay, “How to Stand Out in the City” (1960) and Helmut Newton “Beautiful Beast Looks” (1961).

14. Compare for example the framing and reception of the surrealist Claude Cahun’s (born Lucy Schwob, 1894–1954) ‘rediscovered’ photographic archive from the 1990s on. With the advent of WWII, Cahun’s work fell into obscurity. While her biography has certainly been investigated – see for example François Leperlier, Claude Cahun (1992) – the subsequent retrieval of her work, now a considerable body of literature, has been predominantly theoretically driven.

15. Reference is made to Richard Martin’s landmark text Fashion and Surrealism (1989) (p. 47) and to Elsa Schiaparelli (p. 164).

16. Zox-Weaver (2003: 132) states, “After joining the staff of British Vogue in 1940, Miller gradually abandoned commercial fashion photography to pursue her interest in the war-torn cityscapes of London.”

17. Widely reported—as Conekin notes, the art director of American Vogue, Art Lieberman, published a selection of Miller’s photographs of Buchenwald under the banner “Believe it,” taking the words from a cable sent by Miller (p. 170).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bronwyn Clark-Coolee

Bronwyn Clark-Coolee is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

[email protected]