"On view at Tate Britain's new Lee Miller exhibition is a pair of near-identical photographs, each no bigger than an iPod Nano, depicting a severed breast laid out on a plate, flanked by a knife and fork. They were dated from around 1930, when a young Miller had been working as Man Ray 's apprentice in Paris. In need of some extra money, she began photographing surgeries at the Sorbonne Medical School and,"
"She had apparently seasoned it with salt and pepper for the photograph, before Vogue's editor-in-chief, Michel de Brunhoff, in a fit of disgust, threw both Lee and the breast out. Absurd, if a little gross, these tiny two photographs have been pulled from the archives for the first time in a retrospective of 230 odd works that chart the restless, shape-shifting life of the photographer Lee Miller."
"By the time those photographs were taken, Miller was already moving through the male-dominated circles of surrealism in Paris, working at Man Ray's studio, first as a model, then as his apprentice and collaborator. Born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, she'd started in front of the lens as a Vogue cover model after being rescued from an oncoming car on a Manhattan street by the publisher Condé Nast himself."
Lee Miller produced provocative images, including small photos of a severed breast taken around 1930 after photographing surgeries at the Sorbonne Medical School. She worked in Man Ray's Paris studio as model, apprentice and collaborator, absorbing surrealist practice and later opening studios in Paris and New York. Early success as a Vogue cover model followed a rescue from an oncoming car by publisher Condé Nast. She married Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934 and relocated to Cairo. The Tate Britain retrospective presents approximately 230 works tracing Miller's varied career across fashion, surrealism and wartime photography.
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