Through Lee's Eyes

Lee Miller was a beautiful woman. She was famous for her glamorous fashion photography and worked with Man Ray, to eventually open her own studio as a Surrealist.

In stark contrast to the beauty of her prior work, her photographs of World War II stand as a mute testimony to man's inhumanity to man.

Whereas the official Lee Miller website indicates she was "probably the only woman combat photo-journalist to cover the war in Eurpope", she was in fact one of several, including Margaret Bourke-White and Dickie Chappelle. But as one of a select few, she brought her artistic sensibilities and her photographic eye to the task of formulating a record of the War.

Elizabeth "Lee" Miller was no stranger to the darkest aspects of humanity. At the age of 7 she was raped and contracted gonorrhea. Subsquently a nude model for her father and brothers, all photographers, she learned the process as well.

A freak near-accident introduced the stunning young woman to Conde Nast, when he pulled her from in front of a car on a Manhattan street. Thus began her modeling career, which put her in front of the camera for a number of years, where she was much in demand. But her creative drive soon led her to pursue her photographic career, including her years with Man Ray, where she was student, lover and muse. Accordingly to numerous sources, many photographs credited to Man Ray were, in fact, Lee's.

Upon leaving Man Ray, and returning to New York, Miller established her own studio and commercial photography business and was a well-known portrait photographer, including among her clients British actress Gertrude Lawrence. Her work was also included in numerous exchibitions. Her commerical endeavor was abandoned when she met, and married, Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey.

However, at the outbreak of WWII the two were separated and Miller was living in London with British artist, Roland Penrose (their son, Anthony Penrose authored the books, Lives of Lee Miller and Lee Miller's War).

Her professional association with Conde Nast led to her receiving accreditation as a war correspondent for the U. S. Army at the age of 35. She and Life Magazine correspondent David E. Scherman worked together and he was the photographer of the famous photo of Lee, above, bathing in Hitler's bathtub. Note her boots, which were covered in the mud of Dachau, the liberation of which she witnessed and recorded.

Throughout the War in Europe she recorded the people and the carnage with unerring vision. Her photographs of a field hospital in Normandy contain pictures of her fellow female participants in the war, the field hospital nurses. She was one of the first journalists into the concentration camps, Buchenwald and Dachau. She recorded the devastation of the London blitz, the aftermath of the Normany D-Day landings, the liberation of Paris, numerous battles and likewise recorded the human toll of men, women and children off the battlefield. Not only providing the photographs, she wrote the text that accompanied them. Following the war she remained to catalogue for the world the devastation wrought upon the lands and the people.

While her surrealist taste led her to photograph wrecked pianos, crushed typewriters and mannequins amid the rubble of destruction, it is the photographs of the toll on humanity that resonate to me. Her famous photograph of a dead German SS officer , above,illustrates the quiet power of her work.

Among her husbands and lovers were Shuman, Penrose, Man Ray, Aziz Eloui Bey. Following the war she suffered from Post Traumatic Stress and her later life was complicated by alcohol and her emotional problems. When she discovered she was pregnant with Anthony, who was to be her only child, she married Penrose and the moved to Sussex and lived on Farley Farm, which became a gathering place of artists, but Miller gave up photography for gourmet cooking.

Upon her death from cancer at aged 70, Lee was cremated and her ashes scattered in her herb garden.

Her lack of communication on her life and her war experiences was not to stifle her history. Her son, Anthony, discovered her journals and the negatives of her photographs, thus enabling us to view the world that Lee Miller viewed. Through her talented and tormented eyes.

In addition to Anthony Penrose's books on his mother's work and her life, biographer Carolyn Burke released "Lee Miller, A Life", in 2006.

Other titles by and about Lee Miller, her life and her art include:

The Art of Lee Miller by Mark Haworth-Booth (Yale Univ. Press)
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose: The Green Memories of Desire by Katherine Slusher(Prestel Publishing)
Roland Penrose & Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer by Penrose & Miller(National Galleries of Scotland)
Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life by Richard Calvocoressi

Through Lee's Eyes

Lee Miller was a beautiful woman.

War Is Hell

I'm distracted from my studies of the "good war", fought by the "Greatest Generation", as a result of studies and reports on the current misguided military excursion. I don't want to call it a war because that gives it an official status that I cannot tolerate.

Beyond the 4,000 plus soliders - men and women, so many of them teens and young adults - who have died, there are the countless thousands who are coming home not just wounded, battered, and bitter, but homicidal and suicidal. They are having flashbacks and uncontrollable impulses. They are killing wives, girlfriends, husbands, children, family members and perfect strangers. And themselves.

The untold number of suicides is a disgraceful fact being hidden by the government, the VA hospitals, the military and yes, the media.

For shame.

For the life's blood of our youth.

For the future of this country.

Won't someone have the courage to stand up and tell the truth?

Blood & Guts

A few weeks back, there was an obit for a lady from France who'd been a spy. Then a few days ago, there was another.

I've got the clips somewhere and I'll do a more in depth analysis, but ultimately I wanted to note their passing.

They were spies. They led troops. They saved men. One was a little feminine thing and she made numerous trips over various mountain ranges, leading downed pilots to safety. She got medals and acclaim, but in the end, until she died, who knew?

The other lady was less "hands on" shall we say, but equally important.

So why aren't they the stuff of legends? Why aren't they listed in the "Greatest Generation" bestsellers? What happened to the women who gave their lives?

I'm getting a slow start, but I'm not giving up on the commemorative projects I envision for these brave souls.

If you have other anecdotes, if you know women who gave their all - or even a lot - let me know. Because I'm here for the long haul and I'll have these ladies' contributions in print or else.

Angels of Mercy

Nurses in World War II were not sequestered on the hospital ships, or in facilities far from the action. In fact, they were placed directly in the thick of the fighting and, on the occasion of the American's loss of Corregidor, they ended up captured, along with their patients and were put into prisoner of war camps where they spent the remainder of the war.

Once such camp, Santo Thomaso, became a tiny sea of hope where, for years, nurses labored to stave off starvation and death by slow, torturous diseases like beri beri and malaria. Too, they suffered the physical torture and abuse of their Japanese captors.

The pictures of these nurses survive. Smiling, healthy looking women making the best of difficult conditions, smiling in the face of hardship. The same women - those who survived - were likewise pictured smiling upon their release. Older, worn, haunted, and cadaverously thin, yet smiling at their good fortune to have survived what killed not only other nurses, but civilians and other military personel.

Sisters of healing, the descendants of Florence Nightengale and Clara Barton, heroine of the Civil War battlefields, where she fought the prejudice of the time against women participating or even witnessing the brutality of that most horrible of wars. Heirs of the nurses of WWI who, unheralded and for the most forgotten, they, too, toiled on the battlefields, drove ambulances, and died. They didn't die with weapons at their side, but with implements of healing in their hands.

Never forget these women. Never forget their monstrous bravery to face the carnage of war with only a smile and a bit of bandage. Never forget that they, too, fought for their nation with all they had at their disposal. Their hearts.

The Women Who Went To War

The Greatest Generation. Soldiers, sailors, pilots. Fighting and dying in Europe, the Pacific, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We see the photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima and august authors write somber histories of the sacrifice of men from all walks of life.

Images of women are few and far between. They are Rosie the Riveter. They are crying Mothers and Wives. They are smiling USO workers. And in the index of history books under "women" you see prostitutes listed.

What is missing is the history of the women who left their homes and lives and joined the war effort by placing themselves in harm's way. They lived, and died, for their country and I want to tell their stories. I am a writer and I am writing about the women who went to war. They went as nurses in Europe, and the Pacific. They were interned in Japanese prisoner of war camps, like Santo Thomaso. The went as OSS agents - the covert agency that became the CIA - and they were smuggled into Europe where they reported from France and behind enemy lines in other places in Europe - where some were captured, tortured and died without breaking. They went as journalists and photographers and reported the victories and defeats and the human carnage that they witnessed; and women were among the first into the death camps to record the horrors. They went as pilots, joining the Women's Air Force Service Pilot program under Jacqueline Cochrane, with requirements so stringent that male pilots would not have qualified. They ferried planes, tested new models - including the notorious Bunsen Burner that killed indiscriminately - and trained gunners by towing targets behind their planes. While freeing up male pilots for the war effort, they logged thousands of hours and they died, alone, in the effort. They went to war with their minds, working on the top secret Manhattan Project, from Los Alamos and the race for the bomb, to the monstrous Oak Ridge plant in Tennessee where they aided in the distillation of the precious chemical elements that made a bomb possible; and they deciphered codes, and relayed messages as radio operators, and filled clerical positions. And they did go to war by going to the factories to pick up where their men had left off, to produce planes and tanks and weaponry. And they went to war to keep up morale, as USO performers and Red Cross Workers. They answered the call to arms, but they were given no weapons to fight with. Instead hey were given cameras, and typewriters and planes and microphones, and medical supplies. They were resented and they were harrassed. And they marched into war with all the valour and bravery of their male counterparts. And for their efforts they have been forgotten.

What the macho adventure and espionage authors have done for men and the military, I aim to do for the women in World War II. Nurses, pilots, reporters, spies, scientists, assembly-line workers and singers. Their stories are just waiting to be told. And it is about time they were.