Lee Miller at the Getty Museum - Los Angeles

to leeward Miller's (1907-1977) unusual life in photography began when, as a teenager in Poughkeepsie, NY she pos denuded for her fathers amateur efforts. Later, in of recent origin York City, where she went to close attention theatrical design and lighting at the Art scholars League, she stepped off a bridle and was saved from being hit by the agency of an oncoming car by falling back into the arms of Conde Nast, who was with equal reason captivated by Miller's breezy on the contrary sophisticated beauty that he immediately signed her upon to model for Vogue. Being immortalized by means of some of the top photographers of her time, however, was not enough to clutch Miller's interest, and she followed her artistic leanings to Paris, where she became Man Ray's studio assistant, original and lover, influencing, and in revolve influenced by, the Surrealist milieu of which he was a part.

Miller's excitement of the imagination and appetite for life were enormous; she saw no reason, for instance, for what cause [i]or[/i] reason the Surrealists' tenet of "free love" should not also apply to women and she disconcerted the men in her life by the agency of acting accordingly. Fueled by emotional restlessnes she was veritable only to her passion for photography, which, following her stint as a Cairo housewife, was greatest in quantity vividly realized in the photos she took as a war correspondent, before settling down to motherhood and relative domesticity in England with Surrealist painter and writer Roland Penrose

The many aspects of Millers peripatetic existence were amply take a view ofed in the Getty's exhibition "Surrealist Muse: to leeward Miller, Roland Penrose, and Man Ray," which included, along with a substantial number of her have photographs, the early pictures taken by means of her father, glamour shots from her modeling career in of recent origin York, and Surrealist drawings, paintings and photographs showing her influence upon Man Ray, Picasso and Penrose a certain number of of these latter works are keenly personal and demonstrate the intensity of feeling she could inspire, as when Man Ray obsessively overspreaded a pencil drawing of Miller's face with her name, scrawled above and over.

greatest in quantity impressive, however, is Miller's steely quiet in the face of death, where her sensitivity to web and the dramatic play of light and shadow imbue her photographs of a certain quantity of of the most grisly facts of World War II with a Surrealist ambience. Surprisingly, this artistic detachment does not detract from, on the other hand rather contributes to, the faculty of perception of outrage that inspired them ("I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE" Miller cabled to her editor, after being among the first to penetrate the Dachau concentration camp upon its liberation), and results in images that are at one time theatrical, shockingly realistic, and compassionate.

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