Lee Miller: A Life

A trenchant yet sympathetic portrait of Lee Miller one of the iconic faces and careers of the twentieth century. Carolyn Burke reveals Miller as a multifaceted woman: both model and photographer muse and reporter sexual adventurer and mother and in later years gourmet cookthe last of the many dramatic transformations she underwent during her lifetime. A sleek blond bombshell Miller was part of a glamorous circle in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as a leading Vogue model close to Edward Steichen Charlie Chaplin Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. Then during World War II she became a war correspondentone of the first women to do soshooting harrowing images of a devastated Europe entering Dachau with the Allied troops posing in Hitlers bathtub. Burke examines Millers troubled personal life from the unsettling photo sessions during which Miller both as a child and as a young woman posed nude for her father to her crucial affair with artist-photographer Man Ray to her unconventional marriages. And through Millers body of work Burke explores the photographers journey from object to subject; her eye for form pattern and light; and the powerful emotion behind each of her images.A lushly illustrated story of art and beauty sex and power Modernism and Surrealism independence and collaboration Lee Miller: A Life is an astute study of a fascinating yet enigmatic cultural figure.