Lee Miller لي ميلر

لي ميلر، اسم أصبح مرادفًا للجمال في منتصف عشرينات القرن العشرين، فتاة ولدت في مدينة بوكيبسي بولاية نيويورك الأمريكية، في الـ23 من أبريل عام 1907، وفي سن الـ18 شدت رحالها إلى عاصمة الموضة، باريس، في سن الـ18 لتبدأ طريقها كعارضة أزياء، قبل أن تعود إلى نيويورك لتصنع اسمًا من ذهب في مجالها.

Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), was an American photographer. She was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

كانت اللحظة الفارقة في حياة الفتاة اليافعة حين كادت سيارة أن تصدمها، لتكتشف أن قائد السيارة لم يكن سوى كوندي ناست، الرجل الذي صنع إمبراطورية «ناست للنشر»، تلك المسؤولة عن إصدار أشهر المجلات كـVogue وVanity Fair، لتجد نفسها سريعًا في جلسات تصوير لتلك المجلات الشهيرة، ووصفت نفسها حينها قائلة: «كنت أبدو من الخارج كالملاك، لكنني كنت شيطانة من الداخل»، كما نقلت مجلة New York في عددها الصادر في 16 ديسمبر عام 1985.

Miller was born on April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her parents were Theodore and Florence Miller (née MacDonald). Her father was of German descent, and her mother of Scottish and Irish descent. She had a younger brother named Erik, and an older brother named John. Theodore always favored Lee, and he often used her as a model for his amateur photography. When she was seven years old, Lee was raped while staying with a family friend in Brooklyn and infected with gonorrhea. She traveled to Europe in 1925, staying in Paris to study art. Miller's time in Europe was brief, being called back to New York by her father. Upon her return, she enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in New York City.

نجاح «ميلر» في نيويورك لم يمنعها من الذهاب إلى باريس كثيرًا وفي إحدى تلك المرات قابلت الفنان الأمريكي مان راي، أحد الأعلام في تاريخ التصوير والفن السريالي وأرادت أن تصبح طالبته، وروت تفاصيل مقابلتها الأولى معه: «قال لي إنه لا يقبل طلابًا وإنه في جميع الأحوال سيغادر باريس لقضاء أجازته فقلت له أعلم ذلك وسأذهب معك وفعلت».

Miller's father introduced her and her brothers to photography at an early age. She was his model – he took many stereoscopic photographs of his nude teenage daughter – and he also showed her technical aspects of the art. Aged 19 she nearly stepped in front of a car on a Manhattan street but was prevented by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue. This incident helped launch her modeling career; she appeared illustrated in a blue hat and pearls in a drawing by George Lepape on the cover of the Vogue edition of March 15, 1927. Miller's look was exactly what Vogue's then editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase was looking for to represent the emerging idea of the "modern girl."

وتحت إشرافه أصبحت مصورة محترفة، وتحولت من خلال عدسته هو من مجرد عارضة أزياء إلى إلهة السريالية وتحولت إلى نجمة كبيرة، كما كانت كذلك عشيقته.

For the next two years she was one of the most sought-after models in New York, photographed by leading fashion photographers including Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, Nickolas Muray and George Hoyningen-Huene.

وحل العام 1936 وكان الوقت مناسبًا لها لأخذ خطوة جديدة في حياتها، خطوة لم تكن لتسعد الجميع، خاصة تلك الزوجة التي رأت زوجها يغرم بـ«ميلر».

Lee Miller, Fire Masks, 1941. During the London Blitz

A photograph of Miller by Steichen was used to advertise Kotex menstrual pads, without her consent, effectively ending her career as a fashion model. She was hired by a fashion designer in 1929 to make drawings of fashion details in Renaissance paintings but in time grew tired of this and found photography more efficient.

قصة عارضة أزياء عالمية أحبها رجل أعمال مصري: طلق زوجته من أجلها فخانته وتصورت في «بانيو هتلر»

While she was in Paris, she began her own photographic studio, often taking over Ray's fashion assignments to enable him to concentrate on his painting.

لى ميلر بعمر 27 مع زوجها المصرى عزيز علوى بك بعمر 47 سنة , القاهرة سنة 1835م

Lee Miller, 27, and her first husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, 47, in Cairo. c. 1935 

In 1929, Miller traveled to Paris with the intention of apprenticing herself to the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Although, at first, he insisted that he did not take students, Miller soon became his model and collaborator (announcing to him, "I'm your new student"), as well as his lover and muse.

كان رجل الأعمال المصري عزيز بك علوي، في رحلة لنيويورك لشراء معدات للسكة الحديد المصرية، ليقع في غرام «ميلر»، التي كانت قد افتتحت استوديو خاص بها، وقررت «ميلر» التخلي عن الاستوديو من أجل حبيبها المصري لترحل عن نيويورك وتعود معه إلى القاهرة، أما هو فقرر أن يطلق زوجته من أجل الفاتنة الأمريكية، الخبر الذي وقع وقع الصدمة على الزوجة لتقرر أن تنهي حياتها بأيديها وتنتحر.

Picasso and Miller at the Rue des Grands Augustins in Paris, 1944

In fact, many of the photographs taken during this period and credited to Ray were actually taken by Miller. Together with Ray, she rediscovered the photographic technique of solarisation. She was a participant in the surrealist movement, with her witty and humorous images. Amongst her circle of friends were Pablo Picasso, Paul Éluard, and Jean Cocteau, who was so mesmerized by Miller's beauty that he coated her in butter and transformed her into a plaster cast of a classical statue for his film, The Blood of a Poet (1930). During a dispute with Ray, regarding the attribution of their co-produced work, Ray is said to have slashed an image of Miller's neck with a razor.

Lee Miller, Paris 1929 by Man Ray

After leaving Ray and Paris in 1932, she returned to New York City and established a portrait and commercial photography studio (with $10,000 worth of backing from Christian Holmes II and Cliff Smith) with her brother Erik (who had been working for the fashion photographer Toni von Horn) as her darkroom assistant. Miller rented two apartments in a building one block from Radio City Music Hall. One of the apartments became her home while the other became the Lee Miller Studio.

وفي القاهرة لم تستطع ابنة نيويورك التأقلم مع الأجواء المصرية، فقامت برحلات إلى الصحراء حيث التقطت أشهر صورها بعنوان «بورتريه الفضاء»، أثناء رحلة لها في واحة سيوة عام 1937، العام نفسه الذي شهد عودتها إلى باريس بعد أن تركت زوجها دون أن تتطلق نتيجة شعورها بالملل من القاهرة.

Clients of the Lee Miller Studio included BBDO, Henry Sell, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, Saks Fifth Avenue, I. Magnin and Co., and Jay Thorpe. During 1932 Miller was included in the Modern European Photography exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York and in the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition International Photographers with László Moholy-Nagy, Cecil Beaton, Margaret Bourke-White, Tina Modotti, Charles Sheeler, Ray, and Edward Weston.

بعودتها إلى العاصمة الفرنسية، التقت السيدة الأمريكية بالرسام السريالي البريطاني رولاند بينروس ووقعت في حبه.

Lee Miller, Irmgard Seefried, Opera singer singing an aria from ‘Madame Butterfly,’ 1945

In response to the exhibition, Katherine Grant Sterne wrote a review in Parnassus in March 1932, noting that Miller "has retained more of her American character in the Paris milieu. The very beautiful Bird Cages at Brooklyn; the study of a pink-nailed hand embedded in curly blond hair which is included in both the Brooklyn and the Julien Levy show; and the brilliant print of a white statue against a black drop, illumine the fact rather than distort it."

In 1933, Julien Levy gave Miller the only solo exhibition of her life. Among her portrait clients were the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, actresses Lilian Harvey and Gertrude Lawrence, and the African-American cast of the Virgil Thomson–Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934)

«بورتريه الفضاء» 

ومع اندلاع الحرب العالمية الثانية، كانت نقطة التحول الأبرز في تاريخ «ميلر»، فتحولت من عارضة أزياء ومصورة للمشاهير إلى مراسلة حرب، وشهدت بعض أشهر أحداث الحرب الدموية، إحداها كانت معركة «نورماندي» الشهيرة، والتي شهدت الاستخدام الأول لقنابل النابالم الحارقة، بالإضافة إلى العديد من المعارك الأخرى، لتتحول حياتها من قمة الرفاهية إلى قمة الدراما على خط النار، مع تقدمها رفقة قوات الحلفاء ودخولها وتصويرها لمعسكرات الإبادة الألمانية.

In 1934, Miller abandoned her studio to marry the Egyptian businessman and engineer Aziz Eloui Bey, who had come to New York City to buy equipment for the Egyptian National Railways. Although she did not work as a professional photographer during this period, the photographs she took while living in Egypt with Eloui, including Portrait of Space, are regarded as some of her most striking surrealist images.[citation needed] In Cairo, Miller took a photograph of the desert near Siwa that Magritte saw and used as inspiration for his 1938 painting "Le Baiser."

By 1937, Miller had grown bored with her life in Cairo and returned to Paris, where she met the British surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose, whom she later would marry. Also in 1934, Miller contributed an object to the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition at the London Gallery. Four of her photographs ("Egypt" (1939), "Roumania" (1938), "Libya" (1939), and "Sinai" (1939)) in the 1940 exhibition Surrealism To-Day at the Zwemmer Gallery in London. The following year her work was included in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition Britain at War in New York City. Her photographs were not included in another exhibition until 1955, when her work was displayed in the renowned The Family of Man exhibition curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the MoMA Department of Photography.

وتبقى إحدى أشهر صور «ميلر» من الحرب العالمية الثانية تلك التي التقطت لها وهي تستحم في بانيو الفوهرر نفسه، أدولف هتلر، في شقته في مدينة ميونخ الألمانية.

Lee Miller, SS Guard in Canal, 1945

World War II

At the outbreak of World War II, Miller was living in Hampstead in London with Penrose when the bombing of the city began. Ignoring pleas from friends and family to return to the US, Miller embarked on a new career in photojournalism as the official war photographer for Vogue, documenting the Blitz. She was accredited into the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942. She teamed up with the American photographer David E. Scherman, a Life correspondent on many assignments. She traveled to France less than a month after D-Day and recorded the first use of napalm at the siege of St. Malo, as well as the liberation of Paris, the Battle of Alsace, and the horror of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. A photograph by Scherman of Miller in the bathtub, with a shower hose looped in the center behind her head, recollecting a noose, taken at Adolf Hitler's apartment in Munich is one of the most iconic images from the Miller–Scherman partnership. Being one of the first to arrive at Hitler's secret apartments, Miller admits "I had his address in my pocket for years." After taking the bathtub picture, Miller bathed in Hitler's tub and slept in his bed. During this time, Miller photographed dying children in a Vienna hospital, peasant life in post-war Hungary, corpses of Nazi officers and their families, and finally, the execution of Prime Minister László Bárdossy. After the war, she continued to work for Vogue for a further two years, covering fashion and celebrities.

lee miller in hitlers bath hitlers apartment munich

وبعد الحرب، عادت «ميلر» إلى بريطانيا، واستمرت في العمل في مجلة Vogue ومجلات أخرى، إلا أن سريعًا ما ظهر عليها علامات مرض الاكتئاب، وبدأت في شرب الخمر بإفراط، قبل أن تعود إلى الولايات المتحدة بصحبة «بينروس» لتكتشف لاحقًا أنها حامل منه، فتقرر الطلاق من زوجها المصري والزواج من عشيقها البريطاني.

Life in Britain

After returning to Britain from central Europe, Miller started to suffer from severe episodes of clinical depression and what later became known as Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She began to drink heavily, and became uncertain about her future. In 1946, she traveled with Penrose to the United States, where she visited Ray in California. After she discovered she was pregnant by Penrose with her only son, she divorced Bey and, on May 3, 1947, married Penrose. Their son, Antony Penrose, was born in September 1947.

In 1949, the couple bought Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex. During the 1950s and 1960s, Farley Farm became a sort of artistic Mecca for visiting artists such as Picasso, Ray, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Jean Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, and Max Ernst. While Miller continued to do the occasional photo shoot for Vogue, she soon discarded the darkroom for the kitchen, becoming a gourmet cook. According to her housekeeper Patsy she specialized in "historical food" like roast suckling pig as well as fare such as marshmallows in a cola sauce (especially made to annoy English critic Cyril Connolly who told her Americans could not cook). She also provided photographs for biographies Penrose wrote on Picasso and Antoni Tàpies. However, images from the war, especially the concentration camps, continued to haunt her and she started on what her son later described as a "downward spiral". Her depression may have been accelerated by her husband's long affair with the trapeze artist Diane Deriaz.

ولم تستطع «ميلر» التخلص من الاكتئاب الذي أصابها بعد الحرب، وظلت مشاهد معسكرات الإبادة البشعة تطاردها، كما كانت خيانة زوجها لها مع الفنانة ديان ديرياز سببًا في زيادة اكتئابها، كذلك حملت لها فترة الأربعينات والخمسينات حالة من القلق، بعدما تم التحقيق معها من قبل المخابرات البريطانية بعدما أصابهم الشك من إمكانية أن تكون المرأة الفاتنة عميلة للمخابرات السوفيتية.

Miller was investigated by the British security service MI5 during the 1940s and 1950s, on suspicion of being a Soviet spy.

In October 1969, Miller was asked in an interview with a New York Times reporter what it was that drew her to photography. Her response was that it was "a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you."

حياة «ميلر» انتهت نهاية مأساوية تليق بما كانت عليه في سنوات الحرب وما بعدها، فرحلت عن الدنيا في سن الـ70 عام 1977 متأثرة بمرض السرطان، الذي وضع كلمة النهاية لقصة حملت من الدراما ربما أكثر من أعظم أفلام هوليوود.

Death

Miller died from cancer at Farley Farm House in 1977, aged 70. She was cremated, and her ashes were spread through her herb garden at Farley.