Lee Miller: Photographer

This exhibition is now closed

Following a highly successful tour of the United States and Europe, this exhibition has been made available for a New Zealand tour by the Lee Miller Archive in Sussex.

This will be the first time an extensive survey of Miller's photographs has visited New Zealand and it introduces us to a remarkably talented and dedicated photographer whose work behind the camera has sometimes been eclipsed by the highly melodramatic nature of her life.

Lee Miller was a breathtaking beauty whose face graced the cover of 'Vogue', an impulsive traveller, risk-taker and a legendary heart breaker. Her friends, lovers and photographic subjects were among the most brilliant artists, writers and intellectuals of Europe. The 96 works in this exhibition span her career from 1929 to 1964, taking us from the cafes of Paris to the battlefields of the Second World War, and revealing the extremes of the era and the richness of her life.

Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York and first entered the world of photography as a model to some of the great photographers of her day. In 1929 she went to Paris where she worked with Man Ray and established a photographic studio of her own. Working first as a portraitist and fashion photographer, she later moved on to Surrealist images. A marriage in 1932 took her to Cairo and later to London where she was working at the outbreak of the war.

In 1944 Lee Miller became an accredited photographic correspondent to the US Army. She was possibly the only woman combat photo-journalist and witnessed the liberation of Paris, Buchenwald and Dachau, following the American troops on their overseas campaigns.

After the war Lee Miller continued to work for Vogue. In 1947 she married Roland Penrose and produced the photographs for his biographies of Picasso, Miro, Man Ray and Tapies. Lee Miller: Photographer will fascinate photographers, historians and all those who enjoy the special entre into another's world provided by the all-encompising eye of the skilled photographer's camera.

Brought to New Zealand and toured with the support of Kodak NZ Ltd.

This exhibition was held at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in the Botanic Gardens.