North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery Puts a Spotlight on Photojournalist Lee Miller

Worlds shift and collide through the lens of Lee Miller. The late American photographer and photojournalist created an exceptionally far-ranging body of work, spanning sleekly cool fashion shoots and surrealist techniques, intimate portraits of artists and activists and starkly brutal reportage from the final throes of the Second World War. Her personal dramas often dominate mainstream attention on screen, page, and stage, including her youthful stint as a Vogue model, her early apprenticeship with the Paris-based artist Man Ray, and her eventual marriage to the British painter and curator Roland Penrose. In the 2023 biopic Lee, Miller is portrayed by Kate Winslet, who echoes her original no-nonsense attitude: “I’d rather take a picture than be one.”

Amid the widespread reawakening to Miller, a new exhibition places the focus on her creative expressions. Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932-1945) at The Polygon Gallery (November 7 to February 1) reflects the breadth, innovation, and enduring relevance of her images taken within a concentrated period. Some of these images appear suspended in time. Others, including the “solarization” technique she perfected with Man Ray (in which tones are reversed through overexposure), appear projected from the future.

“I decided to highlight her career as a photographer, one who could photograph, print, retouch, run a studio, work in fashion, portraiture, and photojournalism, as a war photographer,” exhibition curator Gaëlle Morel explains. “The idea was to present her as a versatile and talented professional, and having access to the family archive, including letters, meant that I could focus on her relationships with her clients, editors, colleagues, the compromises that she had to make, but also how proactive she was, how she would seize opportunities, rise to the occasion, push her luck, et cetera. Women photographers are rarely described as professionals, skilled technicians, business savvy, able to market their practice. She had a prolific and successful career, even if it was relatively short.”

Morel chose instead to emphasize Miller’s practice beyond her brief relationship with Man Ray. “She is often reduced to being his muse.”

At seven, Miller had been raped. In adulthood, she did not speak of the wartime horrors she had witnessed.

As Morel notes, Miller’s archive has been key to unlocking her legacy—and is based at her family home of Farleys House in the English countryside, where her son, Antony Penrose, and granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane, are now custodians and guides. Miller moved to Farleys with her husband and infant son in 1949 and lived here until her death in 1977 at the age of 70.

Visiting Farleys House is an aptly surreal experience: it is a vivid burst of artistry, unexpectedly tucked away in the hamlet of Muddles Green in East Sussex, on the edge of the South Downs. A tour of the house presents an array of photographs and designs by Miller, Roland Penrose, and close friends including Picasso and Man Ray, as well as Miller’s personal effects, from bespoke knuckledusters (carried during her time as a war correspondent) to culinary mod cons (in her later years, she eschewed photography for cordon bleu cookery). The picturesque grounds include contemporary art installations, as well as the surprising setting for Miller’s original negatives and material: a bijou, climate-controlled, and meticulously ordered farm shed. What is also astounding is that Miller’s closest relatives only discovered the full extent of her life experience and work after her death—when Antony Penrose’s wife found an extensive cache of Miller’s previously unseen negatives, personal letters, and manuscripts.

Penrose found himself processing what his mother had silently endured—at seven, Miller had been raped. In adulthood, she did not speak of the wartime horrors she had witnessed but sank into depression and addiction. He also had to reassess the toxic relationship that had only eased toward the end of her life. His 1985 biography The Lives of Lee Miller remains astonishing in its detail and has inspired further tributes, including the recent biopic.

Both Penrose and Bouhassane are genial hosts over tea at Farleys. Penrose describes the moment that he first read his mother’s 26-page manuscript of the siege of Saint-Malo (describing the Second World War battle over a French coastal town) with a mixture of bluntness and tenderness. “I could not believe what I was reading, and there was no byline—so who wrote this?” he recalls. His father solved the puzzle by producing a back issue of Vogue, including Miller’s heavily edited feature as wartime correspondent for the glossy magazine. “I didn’t really understand it at the time, but that was the axis of a complete life-changing moment, because I suddenly realized this woman that I’d thought was a useless drunk actually had a huge, and hugely important, past.”

Bouhassane, who was born shortly before Miller’s death, adds: “I get the impression she wasn’t a touchy-feely type of person. She was practical, and I think one of the reasons why cooking was so good for her was she couldn’t tell people how she felt and that she cared about them, but she could show them through a meal. When you are creative with something, you are putting a piece of yourself in.”

“I can think back to things where she reacted in a guarded, controlled way, but I see where that came from,” Penrose says, nodding. “Imagine going through your life and never talking about a trauma of that magnitude,” he says, referring to his mother’s childhood assault and further traumas that continued into her teens. “What that tells me is that she had a capacity to keep secrets. She wanted to protect Roland, and she didn’t want him to worry about her, so she told him nothing.

“And she would not stand anybody being abusive to women,” he adds. “She had very, very strong views about the importance of self-determination in women.” It is less certain that Miller would have defined herself as a feminist, as he adds: “She didn’t like ‘-ists,’ apart from ‘surrealist,’ because that did everything for her.”

There is a steely elegance to Miller’s images, which is heavily evidenced throughout The Polygon exhibition. It evokes a dignified beauty in series such as Four Saints in Three Acts (depicting the Black American performers of a ground-breaking 1934 opera, led by Eva Jessye). It heightens the shock of her Second World War reportage. Elsewhere, it is unexpectedly droll, including a 1941 Vogue feature on chic utility wear: “Fashions for Factories.”

“There’s also subtlety, and that comes, I think, from the surrealist eye, which is always looking beneath the surface, looking for metaphors, analogies, and so on,” Penrose says.

There are so many strands to Miller’s photography that curating this collection must have been challenging. I ask Morel what has particularly stayed with her about Miller’s work. “Her photographs of the German camps Dachau and Buchenwald are what really distinguish her practice during the war. As a woman, she was not allowed to the front line,” she replies. “But her photographs of the French women who were forcibly shaved for ‘collaborating’ with the Germans are really important, because of how disgraceful this moment was for France. Women were scapegoated and shamed in a country that collaborated heavily with the Germans, and this is an episode that tarnishes the official narrative of a joyful and happy liberation. That Lee Miller made a point of capturing those scenes says a lot about who she was as a woman and as a photographer.”

While the exhibition time frame technically ends in 1945, it also includes a 1946 Pathé image of Miller back covering fashion at the Vogue office. This breezy scene sits in heavy contrast from the wartime atrocities Miller documented just before landing back in “normality.”

“The Second World War touched so many different lives, so many different countries, and yet there was this kind of mass conspiracy that you will come home and pretend that nothing had happened,” Bouhassane says. “She was supposed to go back to Vogue and take pictures of hats and handbags as if she hadn’t watched people being blown down by gunfire in front of her, as if she hadn’t been to these prison camps. She’s watched these life-changing moments. She really struggled.”

During Miller’s lifetime, PTSD was not a commonly diagnosed condition, yet the trauma she witnessed is also evident in her manuscripts, published in Penrose’s book. In one particularly devastating letter, she describes watching a baby die in a Vienna hospital in 1945.

“The war’s finished, but she keeps going. She wants to find something,” Penrose explains.

“They’re refusing to publish it, because people have had enough of horror. She’s trying to say, ‘Look, things are still corrupt. We can’t just leave it here.’”

Miller may have had a capacity to keep secrets, but her work also retains an intensely human, pertinent, even revelatory, power. “It stems from an honesty,” Penrose says. “When I was a kid, one of the things that Lee would say to me was: ‘You can say anything you like, as long as it’s the truth.’”

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