Concept

Lee Miller

Summary
Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), was an American photographer and photojournalist. She was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Miller was born on April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her parents were Theodore and Florence Miller (née MacDonald). Her father was of German descent, and her mother was of Scottish and Irish descent. She had a younger brother named Erik, and her older brother was the aviator Johnny Miller. Theodore always favored Lee, and often used her as a model for his amateur photography. When she was seven years old, Lee was raped while staying with a family friend in Brooklyn and was infected with gonorrhea. In her childhood, Miller experienced issues in her formal education, being expelled from almost every school she attended while living in the Poughkeepsie area. In 1925, at 18, Miller moved to Paris where she studied lighting, costume, and design at the Ladislas Medgyes' School of Stagecraft. She returned to New York in 1926 and joined an experimental drama programme at Vassar College, taught by Hallie Flanagan, a pioneer of "experimental theatre". Soon after, Miller left home at 19 to enroll in the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan to study life drawing and painting. Miller's father introduced her and her brothers to photography at an early age. She was his model – he took many stereoscopic photographs of his nude teenage daughter – and showed her technical aspects of the art. At 19 she nearly stepped in front of a car on a Manhattan street but was prevented by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue. This incident helped launch her modeling career; she appeared in a blue hat and pearls in a drawing by George Lepape on the cover of Vogue on March 15, 1927.
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