Lee Miller - A Remarkable Life

Famous Women Lee Miller was, in the words of painter Eileen Agar, "a remarkable woman, completely unsentimental, and sometimes ruthless." Her life reads like a film script (and has been turned into a film recently). Miller herself spoke of a "restlessness" that defined her career, and that may explain the variety of roles she occupied. She was a model, a muse, a fashion photographer, and a war correspondent. She actually stumbled into the supermodel orbit by almost being run over by a car and landing in the arms of Vogue publisher Condé Nast. Declaring "I wanted to be a photographer myself", she went to Paris to become Man Ray's pupil, muse and lover. After a turbulent professional and private decade, a year into World War II she was hired by Vogue as a photographer. First taking photographs of Britain under fire, she then became an accredited U. S. Army war correspondent, a trail blazer for later women war journalists. She encountered combat, documented the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp and famously and defiantly let her friend David Sherman take a picture of her in Hitler's bathtub. In the course we will follow Lee Miller's career and try to find our what made her life and work so special. Level C1.