Lee Miller: A Labyrinthine Artist

In 1980, Roland Barthes recounted an experience with the sole photograph that, for him, can be assuredly said to exist in memory. It reads like a valedictory statement:

All the world's photographs formed a Labyrinth. I knew that at the center of this Labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole picture, fulfilling Nietzsche's prophecy: "A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne." The Winter Garden Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing … but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me to Photography.¹

It is apt that these words were published only a few years after the death of Lee Miller, whose life has been beautifully reconstructed in Carolyn Burke's tirelessly researched—and to use one of Burke's own words—"pathbreaking" (372) biography: pathbreaking precisely for its admirable attempt in locating this thread through a life well-traveled. Specifically, Burke recalls an episode when Miller, on a visit to Florida in October 1969, was asked by a Times reporter what drew her to photography, if it was about summoning the courage or just pure luck. Miller's response that it was "a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you" (353), encapsulates her risk-taking, pioneering style.

Miller, it seems, did not have a solitary Ariadne's thread that we can cleanly retrace through biography, even one as intricately rendered as Burke's study. Rather, she was a chameleon who shed her skin to reveal yet another layer at every bend in the story. Burke is well aware of this in choosing to document Miller's variations on a theme, successfully borrowing a metaphor from photography and reflecting it back on her protagonist: that of the "flexible vantage point" lensview which allows one "to feel the subject's inwardness, the emotional and aesthetic imperatives at work even as she seized each chance to reinvent herself" (xiii).

Lee Miller's story is unconventional to say the least, neatly divided by Burke into clearly time-defined periods. Raped at the age of seven by a family friend, Miller was scarred by not only the psychological implications of such a trauma but by the gonorrhoea which led to a series of invasive treatments through her tender adolescent years. Just as the rape haunted Miller for the rest of her life, so it does the rest of the book. Burke's major focus, in fact, is on the events that lead to acrimonious sexual politics. "Theodore's 'art studies' are disturbing," (55) Burke relates of the nude photographs of Miller in her teens and twenties taken by her father, in a clipped statement that is starkly juxtaposed with the otherwise fluid prose. Further on, Burke finds fault with a book that refers to Miller's part in the discovery of solarization as "inadvertent" (360). She is at pains to underscore the leitmotiv with dismay, whether it is through the image of the woman who must be content in being an artist's model, dutiful and compliant with his every request or, later, as her husband's—the artist and art collector Roland Penrose—housekeeper and secretary whilst he is being knighted. In the postwar chapter entitled Patching Things Up (1946–1950), Burke notes how "Lee took to cooking with all the passion and professionalism she had brought to her reporting"; she follows that with a quote from Audrey Withers, Miller's editor at Vogue, that says it all: "But still, it was not her life" (312). Burke distends her argument perilously close to breaking point here but she stops just short of implosion, instead managing to afford her thesis clarity and energy. Miller's real life, according to Burke, is what came in those impassioned, productive years before and she portrays those years with poignant acuity.

A brief period in Paris at the end of her teens gave Miller a window into a world where art was the...