Surrealist legend

The ravishing new exhibition of Lee Miller’s portrait photographs at the NPG is prefaced by a corridor selection of shots of Miller by others — principally by the fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene (whose assistant she was on French Vogue in 1930) and her long-standing friend and lover, Life photographer David E. Scherman. Miller (1907–77) was a great beauty who had considerable success as a model before taking to the camera herself. She had first wanted to be a painter, and studied lighting and stage design before travelling to Italy to study art. Edward Steichen, who photographed her, suggested she try photography, and at this point she went to Paris to meet Man Ray. She became his pupil, model, lover, and together they discovered the technique of solarisation (overexposing film — Lee apparently turned the light on in the darkroom when a mouse ran over her foot — to change dramatically its tonality).

Miller had the temerity to set up on her own as a photographer and to throw over Man Ray. For the Surrealist men to behave like this was acceptable, but for their women, their Muses? Unthinkable. And what was perhaps worse was that this revolutionary went on to produce extraordinary and memorable photographs, even though she did her best to suppress them in later years. From the Thirties date some of the earliest images in the exhibition — an unrecognisable Charlie Chaplin sporting a candelabra on his head, a predatory Gertrude Lawrence, and the Surrealist box-maker Joseph Cornell, with a model yacht emerging from his coiffure. The selection, of over 100 black-and-white images, has been admirably done, and the installation is both elegant and engaging. This is a joy of an exhibition.

However, the Lee Miller Story has to be separated from Miller’s substantial achievement as a photographer (the archive kept by her son numbers 60,000 negatives), for the legend threatens to swamp the images, and it would be easy to write only about her life.