EXHIBITION
Lee Miller: Coinage of the Mind
13 September – 2 November 2008

The extraordinarily complex life of the photographer, Lee Miller (1907-1977), will be examined in Lee Miller, Coinage of the Mind, from 13 September - 2 November 2008.   Here the roles she played - a legendary beautiful model, an artist’s muse and an acclaimed artist in her own right - will all be explored. 
 
For many years Lee Miller was primarily known as a renowned beauty, model and muse to a number of artists including Man Ray, Picasso and Roland Penrose, the latter to whom she was also married.  The work these men created with Lee typifies the idea of feminine beauty within a society dominated by the conventions of the male-defined sensual nude.  However, over the past twenty years more has become known of the incredible archive of photographs taken by Lee  and it is thought that her strongest and most provocative and narratively seductive work commenced when she moved to the other side of the camera – from ‘the object of the gaze’ to ‘the subject who commands the medium.’

The early images taken in the 20s and 30s offer a surrealist look at people and objects.  As the mood around the world turned darker in the late 30s and 40s so did Lee’s work, and it is as a war correspondent for Vogue that she left an indelible mark.
 
Looking at the tensions created in her work in front of and behind the camera, the exhibition will explore the impact of what she saw through her lens and how this affected her own relationship with her family and how this in turn has inspired her son, Antony and his children Eliza Penrose and Ami Bouhassane. 
 
The exhibition will feature little-seen works from Lee Miller’s and Roland Penrose’s archives, as well as works by Antony Penrose, and his daughters Eliza Penrose and Ami Bouhassane which demonstrates the ongoing legacy her work has on her descendents.
 

Background on Lee Miller
by Sharon-Michi Kusunoki, Curator, Sussex Barn Gallery

Lee first came to the public’s attention in 1927 through Condé Nast who, after pulling her out of the path of a speeding car, signed her on as a model for two of his magazines, Vogue and Vanity Fair.  Her modeling career, although highly successful, ended abruptly the following year after she appeared in an advertisement for Kotex sanitary napkins, something that the American public felt only an ‘utterly debased’ woman would allow. 

This puritanical judgment gave Lee the impetus to move to Paris where she met and formed a partnership with Man Ray - acting as his model, protégée and lover.  One of their most well-known achievements was the development of the ‘solarization’ technique of photography involving the secondary exposure of developing film to light.  Through Man Ray, Lee was introduced to French society and to the avant-garde of the European art world.

Lee’s strongest and most provocative work commenced when she moved to the other side of the camera - from ‘the object of the gaze’ to ‘the subject who commands the medium’.   Although she worked freelance for Vogue from 1939, Lee quickly became bored with ‘frock and handbag’ assignments.  Armed with a typewriter, camera and her eye for the surreal, she captured the devastation resulting from the Wehrmacht’s blitz which was aimed at demoralising and destroying the civilian populations of major British cities.  In 1942, Lee became War Correspondent to the U.S. Armed Forces and her resulting photographs - inquisitive, inherently intrusive and confrontational - challenge the spectator’s right to view and negotiates between feelings of outrage, empathy, captivation and fascination.

Susan Sontag, in On Photography, states that photographs ‘alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.’ In Lee’s life and work she forces us to confront this issue.