The History Channel has released an absorbing video about the life and career of photographer Lee Miller that is narrated by Kate Winslet.
Winslet plays Miller in a biopic entitled Lee that is out in theaters right now. But the History Channel has just released a short five-minute video to its YouTube channel detailing the photographer’s epic life.
The video starts by explaining Miller’s early modeling career which started in the Roaring Twenties and saw her grace magazine covers and serve as a muse for renowned artists.
But Winslet explains that it was her work on the other side of the camera that left the biggest mark. “A unique photographer with a very distinct surrealist style, Lee Miller shot memorable portraits featuring many iconic figures of her time.”
Lee Miller: A Brief History
After a chance encounter with publishing mogul Condé Nast, Miller’s modeling career began to flourish, making her a popular subject for top photographers, including Edward Steichen. However, as Winslet notes, Miller had other ambitions famously saying: “I’d rather take a picture than be one.”
In 1929, she moved to Paris and became a student, lover, and muse of the renowned surrealist photographer Man Ray. Together, they developed innovative photographic techniques, including solarization, which became a hallmark of their work. Lee said she invented the technique after a mouse ran over her foot in the darkroom and caused her to reach for the light switch, the light flooded the developing images which “accidentally created this beautiful, ethereal, halo effect.”
At the outbreak of World War II, Miller was living in London with a man called Roland Penrose. She became a war correspondent for Vogue magazine, documenting the Blitz in London, the liberation of Paris, and the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Her harrowing photographs of war, including scenes from Dachau and Buchenwald, remain some of the most powerful images of the 20th century.
After the war, Miller struggled with PTSD and retreated from photography. She spent her later years in England with her second husband, the aforementioned Penrose.
“After the war, she never spoke of her wartime experiences and deliberately boxed up and put away her photographs in an effort to forget the atrocities she had witnessed,” says Winslet.
Her son Anthony Penrose played a crucial role in getting Miller’s name out there creating the Lee Miller Archives and cooperating with Winslet as she made the eponymous biopic.
Lee is playing in theaters now.