Lee Miller
When Gucci's Creative Director Frida Giannini sent her Gucci goddess down the catwalk for winter 2007 we all wondered in amazement, who's that girl? The answer, according to Frida, was Lee Miller, one of the most iconic photographers of the 20th century - equally at home in riding boots and a flying jacket, or a stunning floor skimming jersey evening gown and diamond brooch. Miller was a fashion photographer who become a war reporter, who was friends with Picasso. And currently the Victoria and Albert Museum in London are celebrating her extraordinary life with a retrospective of her work. Starting her career in front of the camera as a Vogue cover model in the 1920s, she learned her craft from one of the greatest photographers of the early 20th century, the artist Man Ray, who also became her lover. She travelled the world capturing a diverse and ecclectic range of subjects from the Surrealists in 30s Paris to fashion and culture in pre war New York to the battle fields of World War II - as the only female photo-journalist allowed access to combat areas. In 1945 she published a ground breaking story in American Vogue, where she was a staff photographer, called 'Believe This', an expose of the concerntration camps Dachau and Buchenwald and a report from Hitler's abandoned Munich apartment where she was famously photographed by fellow shutterbug David E. Shurman sitting in Hitler's bath. It was the high point of her career. After the war she shied away from the political forum, preferring to spend her days capturing her friends, including Picasso, pop artist Richard Hamilton and the artist Max Ernst, on her Sussex farm where she lived with second husband, the artist Roland Penrose until she died of cancer in 1977.
The Art of Lee Miller is on at The V&A Museum until January 2008.
