Lee Miller

Lee Miller was a Vogue model who became a Surrealist photographer and then a war correspondent, and photographed Dachau on the day of its liberation before washing in Hitler's bathtub the same evening. She was born in Poughkeepsie, was raped at seven by a family acquaintance and photographed nude by her own father through her adolescence, and was pulled out of the path of a car on a New York street in 1927 by Conde Nast, which put her on the cover of Vogue within months. She went to Paris in 1929, told Man Ray she was his new student, and became his assistant, model and lover; solarisation, the tonal reversal in a print that is one of the signatures of the period, was developed by the two of them together after she turned a light on in the darkroom. She set up her own studio, worked in Egypt, and in 1942 was accredited as a war correspondent for Vogue - one of very few women given the status. She covered the siege of Saint-Malo, the liberation of Paris, Buchenwald and Dachau, and her pictures of the camps ran in British Vogue under the words Believe It. The photograph of her in Hitler's bath in the Munich flat, boots on the mat, was taken the same night by David Scherman. She had what would now be called severe post-traumatic stress afterwards, drank heavily, and stopped photographing; her son Antony Penrose found sixty thousand negatives in the attic after she died and has spent decades publishing them. She married the Surrealist Roland Penrose and became, improbably, a serious cook, entering competitions in Sussex. Her wartime dispatches were written as well as photographed and Vogue ran them at length. The archive at Farley Farm is now a museum. Antony Penrose has said he did not know his mother had been a photographer at all until after her death.

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