“She Did the Cooking with the Same Spirit as the Photography”: Lee Miller's Life after Photography

Abstract

Lee Miller (1907–77) was the quintessential modern woman. By the Fall of 1930, this young woman from Poughkeepsie, NY, had already been on the cover of Vogue, invented the photographic process commonly called “solarization” with her lover and teacher, Man Ray, and was regularly appearing in Vogue's pages as both model and photographer. Later, during the Second World War, this model-turned-photographer-turned-war-correspondent was on the staff of British Vogue, at which time Audrey Withers was her editor. In 1996, Withers said that Lee Miller had come “into her own during the war. It had an extraordinary effect on her. Afterwards, nothing came up to it. She was not meant to be married, have children, or live in the country. She thought she wanted security but when she had it, she wasn't happy. She couldn't write.” For many friends, family, acquaintances at the time—and commentators since—the two decades or so from the mid-1950s onward make Miller's life story deeply unsatisfying, with all of its perceived brilliance packed into the first forty years. Because she ceased professional writing and photography in about 1954, few authors or curators have shown much interest in her life after the Second World War. However, what Lee Miller actually did from the mid-1950s until her death from cancer in 1977 was cook gourmet meals, entertain weekend guests in the East Sussex countryside, travel, enter competitions, read, eat and drink, and learn a tremendous amount about classical music. Through existing sources, historical contextualization, and a little work by analogy, I offer a new interpretation of that period.