Even by the standards of the interwar years, when artists in Europe were reinventing themselves at top speed, Lee Miller’s evolution was rapid. Born in New York in 1907, she moved to Paris at the age of 22 and moved in with Man Ray, with whom she pioneered solarisation – a photographic technique in which dark areas appear light and vice versa. She spent the 1930s making her name as a Surrealist photographer, taking snaps of Chaplin, Picasso and other luminaries she knew, running a photography studio in New York and living in Cairo. During the Second World War Miller became a war correspondent for Vogue, capturing the liberation of Paris and of the camps at Dachau and Buchenwald – an experience that left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. She gave up photography a few years later. This retrospective in Chicago, previously at Tate Britain and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, traces the sweep of her career. Of particular note are the pictures she took in Egypt, in which she gets very creative with landscape and architecture (29 August–7 December).
Find out more from the Art Institute of Chicago’s website.
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