venice - The iconic image of Lee Miller immersed in the bathtub of Hitler’s apartment in Munich, a supreme Surrealist gesture, an act of justice and human purification against what she saw in Dachau and Buchenwald, where she entered with the Allies, appears in the last room, “Photographing Horror”.
It is the concluding piece of the exhibition dedicated to the American photographer and to her relationship, first as a student, than as equal, in love and friendship, with Man Ray, staged at Palazzo Franchetti in Venice until April 10. The photograph of her, taken by her colleague, David Scherman, to whom she gave her camera, is one of the signs, together with an image of a model with the arms raised created using the solarization technique - almost a response to a mannequin-woman of the then “master” made years earlier - that helps us understand the spirit of deliberate, absolute freedom that accompanied her many “lives”.
Lee Miller has been a model, a photographer, a muse, the first woman war reporter to document the atrocities of Nazi concentration camps, before definitively abandoning photography. Suzanna, wife of her only son, Antony Penrose, accidentally discovered in the attic in 1977, a few months after the photographer’s death, more than 60 thousand negatives, documents, and magazines which contributed to the rediscovery of Lee Miller, and of a life marked by success but also by strong trauma.
The exhibition, “LEE MILLER MAN RAY. FASCHION-LOVE-WAR”, curated by Victoria Noel-Johnson, organized by CMS.Cultura, in collaboration with ACP-Palazzo Franchetti, through 140 photographs by the two protagonists, along with art objects and videos, also aims - as has been emphasized - “yo offer proper recognition to Lee Miller, a pioneer of Surrealism in photography, placing her on equal footing with Man Ray, whose work tended to overshadow hers both during her lifetime and in the years that followed”.
Structured thematically and chronologically across eight sections, the exhibition opens with the photographer as a model in New York from 1927 and, two years later, as Ray’s muse in Paris, where she had gone to learn photography. “I would rather take a photograph than be one,” she once said. In the following sections, there is a continuous succession of images testifying to years of encounters, choices, research, and experimentation, as well as a renewed engagement with fashion, this time from the other side of the lens. For example, there is a photograph taken in London in 1941 depicting a model posed against the ruins of buildings destroyed by German bombings. It is a sequence of images interwoven with the years of loves and marriages: first, in 1934, to the Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey - one section is titled “Egypt,” featuring “Portrait of Space”, which in 1938 inspired Magritte to paint “Le Baiser” - and later, in 1949, to Roland Penrose. All of this unfolds within a life path in which one of the guiding threads, perhaps the central one, is her professional and deeply human closeness to Man Ray, who remained by her side during the period when she suffered from chronic depression, also as a result of post-traumatic stress caused by what she had witnessed during the war. It was also announced at the exhibition opening that in spring 2023 the film “Lee” would be released, based on the biography written by her son Antony, starring Kate Winslet as Miller and Jude Law as her husband. The cast also includes Marion Cotillard.