Author(s): Walter Moser

Photography

The arrestingly uncompromising photographic legacy of a woman who knew no limits With photographs taken in Vienna in 1945, being shown for the first time Lee Miller (1907–1977) began her artistic career in 1929 as a Surrealist photographer in Paris. She produced images, often in collaboration with Man Ray, in which she alienated motifs by means of tight framing and experimental techniques, and in doing so rendering visible a paradoxical reality. The publication provides renewed access to her best works, including early Surrealist compositions as well as travel photos. At the end of World War II, Lee Miller traveled through Europe as a war reporter, producing harrowing photographs with historical significance. One of her most spectacular pictures originated in late April 1945 in Adolf Hitler’s city apartment at Prinzregentenplatz in Munich: Lee had a photo taken of herself standing naked in the dictator’s bathtub—not long after capturing on film the crimes committed in the concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald immediately after their liberation by the occupying forces, one of the first photographers to do so.