A Few Things You Won't Learn About Lee Miller From the Recent Biopic

...including her groundbreaking work as a surrealist artist, & the real reasons she climbed into Hitler's bathtub

Lee Miller was one of the most important photojournalists to have documented the horror and inhumanity of Nazi death camps. But there’s far more to her legacy. Image: U.S. Army Official Photograph, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I recently saw “Lee”, starring Kate Winslet as the lauded WWII photojournalist, former model and surrealist “muse” Lee Miller. It was a solid, if at times aesthetically and narratively un-ambitious, biopic that I generally enjoyed. But while I’m glad the film from debut director Ellen Kuras, which also stars Marion Cotillard and a surprisingly moving Andy Samberg, brought Miller back into the spotlight, it couldn’t possibly capture her complex legacy in a runtime of just under two hours.

So rather than cranking out a traditional film review (something I’ll leave to the critics this time), I thought I’d offer a few brief notes on what you won’t really learn about the American-born photographer by seeing the movie. One I do recommend reserving for the big screen, if you can.

She was an important surrealist photographer herself— not just a muse and model.

In 2008, Paris’ Jeu de Paume gallery held two commemorative events exploring the surrealist art and legacy of Miller. (screenshot from website)

One of my early Paris apartments circa 2002 or 2003 was decorated with a few prints of Lee Miller portraits, taken by the American-born surrealist photographer Man Ray. I think I (or perhaps my former partner) found them in a bargain bin at a prints shop, or something akin.

I always wrongly presumed (as so many others have) that before Miller became a celebrated photojournalist at the onset of World War II in 1939— notably exposing some of the Nazi’s atrocities by visiting Dachau and Buchenwald shortly after their liberation— she was primarily a model and muse to surrealist photographers and artists including Man Ray and Jean Cocteau. This is the narrative that’s been propagated for decades, at least in mainstream channels.