Lee Miller Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond

Revises conventional biographical accounts of Miller’s work, examining unpublished and lesser-known works, and offering new insights into her relationship with surrealism and the American avant-garde.

This volume offers a major new critical engagement with the work of one of the most significant, and yet critically neglected, twentieth-century American photographers. Applying art-theoretical analyses and insights afforded by previously unseen and unread material in archives and private collections, Patricia Allmer undertakes a series of revisionary readings of many of Miller's works. These include detailed analyses of famous photographs like Portrait of Space and Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy, lesser-known works like her photographic portraits of the cast and production team of the avant-garde opera Four Saints, together with well-known bodies of material like her war-correspondent work for Vogue and the photographs she made in 1944 and 1945 travelling across a Europe ravaged by war and totalitarianism.

The book affords new insights into Miller's complex relations with surrealist groups and American avant-gardes, and into her experiences in Paris, Egypt, London, and Europe during the Second World War, as well as her critically-neglected but significant post-war involvement in developing and contributing work to major exhibitions, organisations, and projects. Allmer makes extensive use of art-theoretical and art-historical analyses to focus critical attention on the photographs themselves as works of art as well as historical documents, and argues strongly for the importance of looking carefully at, and beyond, Miller's extraordinary life in order to comprehend the significance of her photography on its own terms. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of twentieth-century photography, modernism, and surrealism.

Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond offers a major new critical discussion of the work of one of the most significant twentieth-century photographers. Applying art-theoretical analyses and insights afforded by previously unseen material in archives and collections, Patricia Allmer undertakes revisionary readings of many of Miller’s works, including Portrait of Space, Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy and the famous series of war photographs produced for Vogue. At the same time she sheds new light on Miller’s relations with surrealist groups and American avant-gardes, on her experiences in Paris, Egypt and World War II Europe and on her critically neglected post-war activities. Above all, Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond focuses critical attention on the works themselves. As a result it will be of great interest to students and scholars of twentieth-century photography, modernism and surrealism.