F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. The novelist might have changed his tune if he’d happened across a young model called Lee Miller back in the New York of the late 1920s.
Even back then, in her pixie-cropped fashionista era, the New Yorker must have exuded an unquenchable thirst for discovery and reinvention. Fast forward 30 or so years and she’d been a muse for Man Ray and the Surrealist movement, starred in films, become a famous photographer, decamped to Paris, Cairo and London, traversed war-torn Europe as a daredevil journalist and finally, haunted by the conflict, holed in a cosy corner of Sussex to host arty parties and pioneer avant garde recipes like ‘onion upside down cake’ and ‘marshmallow Coca-Cola ice cream’. She died fêted as a celebrity chef. Second act? She had a folio’s worth.
All of those eras are up on the Tate Britain’s walls for the duration of the gallery’s blockbuster exhibition. Dividing Miller’s extraordinary career chronologically, it’s a time-travelling experience as well as a showcase of her technical and compositional skills. ‘Before the Camera’, shows her as a beautiful young model in NYC in 1926, the daughter of a keen amateur photographer. Walk through a dozen or so rooms and there she is, in Hitler’s bathtub, world-famous and hollowed out, returning to self-portraiture to capture a shattered continent in one image.
If the shimmery black-and-white portraits she took – from a playful Charlie Chaplin to bombed-out Londoners – offer glamorous, ghostly and horrifying snapshots of the 20th century, the captions beneath them are worth poring over too. Miller had a gift with the typewriter as well as the camera.
There’s some overlap with the Imperial War Museum’s superb 2015 exhibition about her wartime experiences. There, her images of emaciated concentration camp inmates and dead Nazi guards were stark; here, after all the stylised chic that comes before, they stop you in your tracks. The exhibition culminates with that naked self-portrait, taken with Jewish-American photojournalist David Scherman, in Hitler’s opulent Munich bath. Caked in the mud of Dachau, her boots stand pointedly by the tub. One of the most famous photos of the 20th century, it’s an iconic ‘fuck you’ to the dead Führer.
This sweeping but precisely curated retrospective is a study of the woman as well as the artist. It’s all here: her travels, as if borne on some invisible current; her Bowie-like gift for professional shapeshifting; her puckish humour and a surrealist eye that manifests in brilliantly offbeat photos of Blitz-era London. And finally, the blazing anger that spills from her images of liberated Europe in 1944/45.
Miller struggled with alcoholism and depression in the post-war years and threatened to destroy all of her work. Fortunately, her son, Anthony Penrose, organised its 60,000 prints, negatives, journals and other miscellany into a formal archive, and the rest is history. And all the history is here.
