BELIEVE IT!

Which photographer took a sliced breast from a surgeon’s mastectomy and placed it on a dinner plate beside a knife and fork, turning a saint’s martyrdom into a cannibal’s feast? Which photographer shot a silent movie where the Surrealist artist Man Ray, wearing a transparent nightie, bares his dangling cock and balls and then ostentatiously, on all fours, scratches his ass? Which photographer climbed into a Nazi cattle-car full of skeletal corpses in order to capture the expression on US soldiers’ faces, and sent it home to the fashion magazine Vogue with the command, « Believe It »? And had herself photographed that same night bathing in Hitler’s private bathtub — the night he died by suicide — her muddy army boots planted on the Führer’s bath mat? 

Could this be the same woman who’d already had a successful career as a perfume model, and shocked American audiences by appearing in an ad for menstrual pads? 

Lee Miller (1907-1977) is an American-born photographer whose life’s work is being shown in a breathtaking exhibition that’s travelled from London’s Tate Britain to Paris and now to the Art Institute of Chicago. If you can’t make it to Chicago, check out the accompanying catalogue: its essays, by writers including Deborah Levy, help us understand what it meant, for example, to be a war photographer in the 1940s — working up close on a small Rolleiflex with no zoom lens, auto-wind or built-in light meter, making your own prints in a tent in the field.

By happy chance, a more intimate side of Miller’s work — her informal snapshots of the artists and poets who were her friends and lovers — is the starting point of a new book, Anna Thomasson’s A Vast Horizon. Thomasson’s book focuses on the summer of 1937, when a band of friends including Miller, Picasso, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Surrealist Roland Penrose (Miller’s new lover and future husband), and the poet Paul Éluard gathered in the Hôtel Vaste Horizon on the Côte d’Azur for a last pre-war riot of art, writing, drinking, lovemaking.