Lee Miller at the IWM London

Last week I spent a pleasant afternoon at the ‘Lee Miller: A Woman’s War’ photo exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London.

The Imperial War Museum was a favourite haunt of the male members of our family for the past 20+ years, partly because of the ‘boys’ toys’ aspect of militaria, but also because of the displays’ ability to put flesh on the global conflicts of the 20^th century, politics red in tooth and claw.

 

The very entrance to the museum is a display of shock and awe with its twin 15-inch naval guns, each of them weighing 100 tons and capable of firing a shell more than 16 miles. The guns were built almost exactly 100 years ago and one of them last saw action during the invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

 

Inside, the atrium - unsympathetically re-modelled a few years ago - is stuffed with warplanes, tanks, artillery, rockets and other machines designed solely to destroy and maim.

Thankfully, the permanent gallaries provide space to reflect on various aspects of war, such as the moving display on the history of the Holocaust, the Ashcroft medal gallery, the Secret War displays that illustrate the extreme heroism of spies and guerillas, and the make-do spirit of A Family in Wartime.

The Lee Williams exhibition is on the third floor.

Frankly, before I went I knew very little about her apart from the fact that she was one of the very few female photographers who gained access to the Second World War theatres of conflict. There are many iconic phots from WW2 but I can recall only a handful of photographers: Eisenstaedt, Robert Capa, Joe Rosenthal, Dickey Chapelle…I’m flagging already! Before attending the exhibition, the only photo linked to Lee Williams that I remember was the one taken of her in Hitler’s bath – on the same day that the Fuhrer took his life. 

 

Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller was a quite remarkable woman. Born in the US in 1907, in her early 20s she was one of the most famous fashion models in New York and, by her mid-20s, she was living in Paris, collaborating with the famous surrealist Man Ray. Her circle of friends included Picasso and Jean Cocteau. After establishing a portrait and commercial photography studio in New York, she married an Egyptian, moved to Cairo – but it did not work out and she was living in London with the surrealist painter Roland Penrose (whom she later married) when war broke out. Refusing to flee for refuge to the US, she instead became a war correspondent for Vogue and Conde Nast.

Her war work, particularly photographing the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, took a toll and she suffered from severe clinical depression after the war. Lee and Roland moved to Chiddingly, East Sussex where she transitioned into a successful gourmet cook before succumbing to cancer in 1977, aged 70.        

 

There are over 150 images (and Picasso’s portrait of her) in the exhibition, as well as uniforms, cameras, letters, videos and personal possessions.

Each visitor will take something memorable away from these black and white prints. For me, it was the variety of women’s work in the war years (including armed women in irregular Home Guard units), how fashion considerations impinged even on uniforms during wartime, and the memorable war-time portraits, such as the exhausted nurse at an evacuation hospital, the faces of refugees, collaborators, prisoners and unrepentant Germans.