The Dark Room
Lee Miller, model-turned-war photographer, led a life worth celebrating. It takes a museum to cut through the noise and tease out the essence.
In a time of war, let’s take a moment to salute the war photographers. I’ve known many in my day. Some were animated by attraction to horrors, some were idealists, some wanted to be the eyes of the world — sometimes all at once. They rank among the strangest and most interesting people one can find, and Lee Miller was one of the first. It couldn’t have been easy for a woman of her day, but she made it seem so and did it in high style.
For someone who walks the Earth with some cultural pretensions, I’m not much of a museumgoer. My basic position is that most things seen online or in a book are, while not the same, basically good enough, and also less expensive.
“Please don’t ever say this to people, because you sound like a moron, and it is embarrassing, at least to me,” said my wife. It is one of the afflictions of the human condition that things that would have been phrased more carefully earlier in a relationship come to be, in time, not phrased carefully at all.
She is a museumgoer and as such periodically travels with her art group to fancy places – Milan, Copenhagen, Paris – where they run around enjoying special tours of secret galleries and such. Sometimes our plans converge. And so it came to pass recently that, in London, I was dragged to the Tate Britain.
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The special exhibit in question was a Lee Miller retrospective, and I am ashamed to say that I did not have, prior to this experience, a solid idea of who the hell she was. That she was perhaps the world’s first female war photographer (certainly one of them) was a revelation. For someone who claims to be a photographer, and indeed a foreign correspondent … well, again, my wife was right.
I asked the stern lady guarding the exhibit whether my press card would get me in for free. It turned out that you could not get in at all, as there is a “queue” – and definitely not for free. Various negotiations happened, and the press card actually came in handy, and we were admitted to the hushed and reverential wing where the special exhibit was being exhibited in a manner that actually seemed ordinary: pictures on a wall. But that is where all ordinariness here ends.
Lee Miller’s life has the strange quality of feeling both legendary and oddly hidden. Born in Poughkeepsie in 1907, she first became famous in front of the camera as one of the great Vogue models of the 1920s. Then she escaped the ornamental trap of modeling by moving behind the lens.
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