It’s been years since I’ve produced one of these ‘art’ commentaries but Lee Miller’s work proved irresistible to me.

The Lee Miller show at the Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver)

The walls are usually bright white but this time they’ve painted the them with a colour I would describe as ‘mushroom’ with a bit green to soften the dominant brown. However, your mileage might vary (YMMV) with regard to the walls and my impressions of this show..

Ami Bouhassane, Miller’s granddaughter, mentioned the wall colour as being something she had requested in her (and Elliott Ramsay’s) November 8, 2025 tour of the “Lee Miller: A Photographer At Work (1932—1945)” exhibition at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, Canada. Fascinating and way past oversubscribed, the event held on opening day was a veritable crush.

The second visit allowed for closer examination of the images. You’ll notice some of them have Miller’s crop marks (in red).

The gallery’s mushroom walls serve as an extension for the (mostly) sepia toned fashion images and, later, as a calming background for some of the more disturbing war time images. (Given the time frame, the colour could be associated with the ‘dirty’ Thirties and with camouflage during the war years.) The work ranges from her years working as a fashion model and as a photographer of fashion models and celebrities to her work with British Vogue during the war years where she functioned simultaneously as a fashion photographer with the added role of photojournalist documenting the war through to 1946.

Roughly 50 or more photographs line the walls of three progressively smaller rooms with a glassed-in table (in one room) showcasing newspaper articles featuring Miller’s photographs.

A fascinating collection that is more archival and technical in nature than a more purely artistic display.

How did this artist come to be?

Artists can arise from troubled circumstances and they can arise from idyllic circumstances. The particulars of Lee Miller’s life are fascinating but don’t offer a definitive answer. You won’t see this in the show but it’s one of my favorite photos of Miller; a woman who endured much and kept going. Miller at 53 years old,

Banned from French Vogue’s offices in 1929 after developing a photograph of a breast on a plate as part of a place setting for a surrealist photography exhibition, she brought that unflinching quality to her work during the war years. To be specific, “Lee Miller acquired the breast while photographing the work of a surgeon. When she photographed in French Vogue’s studio, she was thrown out for behaviour deemed offensive.” (See: p.. 139, Notes, Photographic Plates, No. 2 in Lee Miller: Photographs [2023] by Antony Penrose)

Raped and infected with gonorrhea by a family friend at the age of seven, Elizabeth (she later renamed herself Lee as more emblematic of the woman she had become) was a modern woman. Experienced before a camera, her father used her as a model throughout her childhood, she became a famous and infamous model of the 1920s,

This picture was taken after she’d abandoned her career in New York City (NYC) where one of her modeling shots was used, without her knowledge, in a Kotex advertisement. In response, “‘I’d rather take a picture than be one” said Miller according Lucy Scholes’s September 22, 2025 article for Tate Britain. No one in NYC wanted to hire a model associated with women’s sanitary products.

Miller moved to France, continued with a little modeling but mostly focused on work behind the camera as a photographer and member of the surrealist movement being mentored by Man Ray. She and Man Ray feuded (he took credit for some of her work) for a time during which she’d moved back to New York.

The show at the Polygon highlights Miller’s work as a photographer, first, at the studio she opened in New York City in 1932 and through 1945. About two years after opening her New York studio she married an Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, and moved to Cairo where she retired from photography for a time. After recovering from being burnt out, she picked up the camera again. You’ll see some shots from her ‘Egyptian’ period and from the war years that followed.

Arwa Haider’s article for the Autumn 2025 issue of Monte Cristo Magazine provides some insight into the exhibition,

…

Amid the widespread reawakening to Miller, a new exhibition places the focus on her creative expressions. Lee Miller: A Photographer at Work (1932-1945) at The Polygon Gallery (November 7 to February 1) reflects the breadth, innovation, and enduring relevance of her images taken within a concentrated period. Some of these images appear suspended in time. Others, including the “solarization” technique she perfected with Man Ray (in which tones are reversed through overexposure), appear projected from the future.

“I decided to highlight her career as a photographer, one who could photograph, print, retouch, run a studio, work in fashion, portraiture, and photojournalism, as a war photographer,” exhibition curator Gaëlle Morel explains. “The idea was to present her as a versatile and talented professional, and having access to the family archive, including letters, meant that I could focus on her relationships with her clients, editors, colleagues, the compromises that she had to make, but also how proactive she was, how she would seize opportunities, rise to the occasion, push her luck, et cetera. Women photographers are rarely described as professionals, skilled technicians, business savvy, able to market their practice. She had a prolific and successful career, even if it was relatively short.”

…

As Morel notes, Miller’s archive has been key to unlocking her legacy—and is based at her family home of Farleys House in the English countryside, where her son, Antony Penrose, and granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane, are now custodians and guides. Miller moved to Farleys with her husband [second husband, Roland Penrose] and infant son in 1949 and lived here until her death in 1977 at the age of 70.

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There is a steely elegance to Miller’s images, which is heavily evidenced throughout The Polygon exhibition. It evokes a dignified beauty in series such as Four Saints in Three Acts (depicting the Black American performers of a ground-breaking 1934 opera, led by Eva Jessye). It heightens the shock of her Second World War reportage. Elsewhere, it is unexpectedly droll, including a 1941 Vogue feature on chic utility wear: “Fashions for Factories.”

“There’s also subtlety, and that comes, I think, from the surrealist eye, which is always looking beneath the surface, looking for metaphors, analogies, and so on,” Penrose says.

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There are so many strands to Miller’s photography that curating this collection must have been challenging. I ask Morel what has particularly stayed with her about Miller’s work. “Her photographs of the German camps Dachau and Buchenwald are what really distinguish her practice during the war. As a woman, she was not allowed to the front line,” she replies. “But her photographs of the French women who were forcibly shaved for ‘collaborating’ with the Germans are really important, because of how disgraceful this moment was for France. Women were scapegoated and shamed in a country that collaborated heavily with the Germans, and this is an episode that tarnishes the official narrative of a joyful and happy liberation. That Lee Miller made a point of capturing those scenes says a lot about who she was as a woman and as a photographer.”

While the exhibition time frame technically ends in 1945, it also includes a 1946 Pathé image of Miller back covering fashion at the Vogue office. This breezy scene sits in heavy contrast from the wartime atrocities Miller documented just before landing back in “normality.”

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Back to the show and the solution to a mystery

One of Miller’s most famous war images (she takes a bath in Hitler’s tub while David Scherman takes the photo) is not part of the Polygon show,

Not entirely surprising since Tate Britain is also hosting a Lee Miller show, “A major exhibition of the trailblazing surrealist photographer Lee Miller, October 2, 2025 to February 15, 2026,” from the Tate’s exhibition page, Note: A link has been removed,

With the most extensive retrospective of her photography yet staged in the UK, Tate Britain celebrates Lee Miller as one of the 20th century’s most urgent artistic voices.

First exposed to a camera by working in front of it, Miller was one of the most sought-after models of the late 1920s. She quickly stepped behind the lens, becoming a leading figure in the avant-garde scenes in New York, Paris, London and Cairo.

The exhibition will showcase Miller’s extraordinary career, from her participation in French surrealism to her fashion and war photography [emphasis mine]. Exploring her artistic collaborations, the exhibition will also shed light on lesser-known sides of her practice, such as her remarkable images of the Egyptian landscape in the 1930s.

With around 250 vintage and modern prints, including those never previously displayed, the exhibition reveals Miller’s poetic vision and fearless spirit.

Determined to forge her own path, she later commented, ‘It was a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.’

It does seem odd that a copy or reproduction of some kind was not included in the show at the Polygon.

The dirty combat boots on the now dirty bath mat, the publicity shot of Hitler (purposefully added by Miller and fellow photographer, David Scherman), and Miller in the bathtub shielding her breasts while she almost seems to be gazing at the statuary copy (?) in faux marble (?) of a nude woman in the classical style. If you look closer, you’ll see that she’s actually looking up and to her left.

Miller took the bath just hours after she and Scherman had been to Dachau concentration camp to document what had happened and her combat boots bore the mud. Also, Miller, in 1932, played a statue in a Jean Cocteau film “Blood of a poet.” Hard to believe that she was unaware of how eerie that statue’s presence might seem.

Screen shot from “The Blood of a Poet” 1932 by Jean Cocteau (Lee Miller as statue) [downloaded from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021331/?ref_=mv_close] Note: Her shoulders are quite broad. At a guess, Miller held her arms to her body while they attached an armature with the broken arms and then covered her in whatever mixture they used to simulate marble.

In one of those ‘truth is stranger than fiction moments’, the photographs of Miller and Scherman (Miller angled the shot of him upwards to include the shower head; Scherman was Jewish) were taken, unbeknownst to them at the time, on the same day Hitler and his mistress committed suicide, miles away.

Viewing the show at the Polygon (some incongruity)

It’s a privilege to see Miller’s work even if the collection on display is less fulsome than one would like. Clearly, if you have the money and the time, the Tate show is the one to see. For those of us who don’t there’s still a lot to appreciate.

Some of the images showcase fashion that is startlingly contemporary. These days you see actresses with daring cutouts in their dresses at every big event. It’s a surprise to see a cutout garment worn by a model in a picture from 1932, more modestly cut but it’s the same idea.

The movement encompassing celebrity and fashion photography and Miller’s days in Paris with the surrealists to the NYC work to the Egyptian shots to pre-war Europe to the war years, is nothing short of fascinating. I believe all the photographs are 8″ by 10″ if that. As well, you have dimmed lighting and dark walls. So, you might need to lean in a bit to get details for some of the busier shots.

Knowing that Miller covered the war and its aftermath for British Vogue lends a note of incongruity to the show. During the Blitz years, Miller took fashion shots amidst the rubble, there’s this from The Art Story’s Lee Miller webpage,

… The outbreak of World War II led to her most widely-seen work as a photojournalist and war correspondent. Her photographs of the Blitz through 1941 were published in British Vogue and the book Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941). By the end of that year, though, Miller expressed frustration with her work during such perilous times. In a letter to her parents she mused, “It seems pretty silly to go on working for a frivolous paper like Vogue, tho [sic] it may be good for the country’s morale it’s hell on mine”.

…

Later when she got permission to cover the war and its aftermath, she had to pivot from documenting war scenes and concentration camps to taking fashion and celebrity shots in real time. The Polygon shows features at least one of Miller’s images from that war period of Colette, a well known French writer who was a celebrity in her own right (Wikipedia entry).

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (French: [sidɔni ɡabʁijɛl kɔlɛt]; 28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954), known mononymously as Colette or as Colette Willy, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.

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There were others too, such as actress Marlene Dietrich posing in a formal gown and fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli (neither image is in the Polygon show).

It must have been jarring for Miller to move between fashion shots to documenting the war and its aftermath (Bouhassane noted this briefly in her tour of the show). It is to a lesser extent the same for the viewer at the Polygon show where the fashion work moves to images of war scenes, former prisoners of concentration camps, rubble, and women with shorn hair (for the crime of consorting with Nazis beside inmates of concentration camps), and more.

Incongruity: beauty and atrocity (thoughts abut the Polygon show)

We are constantly being confronted with beauty and ugliness and somehow having to navigate the incongruity. Tragedies and art collide in ways that seem incomprehensible when they are brought together as they are in the show at the Polygon and, often, in our daily lives. Shows like this one can offer a way to cope with incongruity.Fashion has often been dismissed as frivolous (I’ve been guilty of this). Looked at in a different way, the impulse to clothe and ornament one’s self or one’s surroundings is a kind of creation and re-creation of beauty of one’s self and one’s surroundings. It can also signify status, defiance, or deception (some of the shots show prison guards trying to masquerade as prisoners).

In looking at the show as a whole, it’s hard not to draw parallels between current events and then. It’s as if the economic despair of the ‘dirty’ 1930s and the horrific acts (invasions, wars, concentration camps, etc.) of the Nazi government have all been compressed into something that looks similar in this decade.

Miller’s war time shots are unflinching and, perversely, hopeful when taken in conjunction with the fashion shots. Sometimes, if you look closely at the shots, you can see many people have dressed themselves up or found a way to present themselves as best they could given their circumstances. Or, perhaps it’s all in my imagination.

You won’t come out of the show dancing with joy but there is a sense that hope is possible.

As noted earlier there are two opportunities to see Miller’s work:

• Lee Miller: A Photographer At Work (1932—1945) at the Polygon Gallery until February 1, 2025 in North Vancouver, entry is by donation.
• Lee Miller (A major exhibition of the trailblazing surrealist photographer Lee Miller) at the Tate Britain (London, England) until February 15, 2026 (free for members, everybody else pays)

The fascinating Lee Miller

In digging for more information about Miller and her work, I found a lot more in addition to what’s already been cited,

• “Lee Miller: Photographs: by Antony Penrose. London (JK), Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2023. [previously cited]
• “North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery Puts a Spotlight on Photojournalist Lee Miller” article by Arwa Haider’s for the Autumn 2025 issue of Monte Cristo Magazine [reviously cited]
• “Lee Miller at Tate Britain review: These images will be seared onto your retina” September 30, 2025 article for The Standard on Yahoo News by India Block.
• “Lee Miller review – a dazzling, daring career from war photographer to surrealist pioneer via Hitler’s bathtub” September 30,2025 article for The Guardian by Charlotte Jansen
• “Lee Miller’s unbelievable life: From Hitler’s bathtub to tomato soup cake” September 7, 2024 article for Independent on Yahoo News by Jessie Thompson
• “I’d rather take a picture than be one” September 22, 205 article by Lucy Scholes for Tate Britain [previously cited]
• Lee Miller exhibition guide for Tate Britain
• Lee Miller on The Art Story website. This offers a summary, a timeline, and more
• “16 Lee Miller Quotes: From Fashion Model to War Photographer” by David on Photogpedia
• “Lee Miller’s Second World War” Imperial War Museum (IWM) London, England

That woman had a life. In the years after the war, Miller drank copiously. She quit at some point but predictably it seemed to have taken a toll.That said, she had a gift for friendship remaining on good terms with many of her friends from before the war and with her ex-husband, Aziz Eloui Bey. (Her second husband, Roland Penrose [a noted figure in the surrealist movement in his own right], was the father of her only child, Antony who grew to become a photographer,)

She also had a gift for reinvention, She became a gourmet cook who served ‘Surrealist’ meals to her guests. (I wonder how many of those guests were aware of her surrealist “breast on a plate, place setting”? With that crowd, it might have been an inducement.)

Object to be destroyed—or not (the end)

[downloaded from https://www.manray.net/object-to-be-destroyed.jsp]

It seems odd to end this piece with what was originally intended to be an insult but it became something else. For me, it’s emblematic of the incongruity in Miller’s work and life.

Here’s how the ‘oblect’ is described on manray.net,

Object to Be Destroyed, 1923 by Man Ray

Man Ray re-created this work multiple times after making the original. The piece was first intended as a silent witness in Ray’s studio – watching him paint. In the second version, which was published in the avant-garde journal This Quarter, in 1932, Ray substituted the eye of Lee Miller, his former lover, after she left him and married a successful Egyptian businessman. He wanted to attack Miller by “breaking her up” in his works that feature her, and thus this second version, called Object of Destruction, was accompanied by the following instructions:

“Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.”

At an exhibition in 1957, a group of students followed the instructions and destroyed the object. It was later reconstructed and made into multiples using the money Man Ray received from the insurance. He renamed the work Indestructible Object.

Go see a Lee Miller show, if you can.