One of the Best Books of the Year: Parade, Glamour, Real Simple, Refinery29, Yahoo! Lifestyle. "A startlingly modern love story and a mesmerizing portrait of a woman's self-transformation from muse to artist." --Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere "I'd rather take a photograph than be one," Lee Miller declares after she arrives in Paris in 1929, where she soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows. As they work together in the darkroom, their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined, changing the course of Lee's life forever. Lee's journey of self-discovery takes took her from the cabarets of bohemian Paris to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII, from inventing radical new photography techniques to documenting the liberation of the concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents. Through it all, Lee must grapple with the question of whether it's possible to stay true to herself while also fulfilling her artistic ambition--and what she will have to sacrifice to do so.

Model, photographer, muse, the first female war correspondent to report the horrors of the concentration camps liberated by American troops, and twentieth-century icon. Lee Miller was all this and much more. She went through life with passion and determination and life repaid her with love and friends, but also with pain and posthumous, or at least tardy, acknowledgement. Through approximately 140 photographs by Lee Miller and Man Ray, some objects d'art and video documents, loaned by Lee Miller Archives and Fondazione Marconi, Lee Miller. Man Ray. Fashion - Love - War intends to do justice to this woman as beautiful as she was clever and talented, taking her out of Man Ray's overpowering shadow, to reveal a deep but complicated relationship more objectively: Man Ray, first her teacher, then lover, and in the end friend. Published on the occasion of the exhibition in Venice, the volume pays suitable homage to Lee Miller, pioneer of surrealism in photography, placing her on a par with Man Ray, whose work tended to overshadow her both during her lifetime and after. The heart of the project lies the relationship between Lee Miller and Man Ray - which blossomed in Paris in 1929 and ended in 1932 - with a focus on their lives, careers and relationships at that time; it also documents the effect they both had on each other and how it inspired their work, including the photographic solarisation technique Man Ray adopted to the point that shots by Miller were erroneously attributed to Ray. The volume also presents portraits by Man Ray of friends and important protagonists of the artistic period: Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí and surrealist shots of Lee Miller in which he seeks to investigate and reveal her soul and torments.

Fashion model, surrealist artist, muse, photographer, war correspondent—Lee Miller defies categorization. She was a woman who refused to be penned in, a free spirit constantly on the move from New York to London to Paris, from husbands to lovers and back, from photojournalistic objectivism to surrealism. Midcareer, she made the unprecedented transition from one side of the lens to the other, from a Condé Nast model in Jazz Age New York to fashion photographer, creating stunning images that imbued fashion with her signature wit and whimsy. Miller became a celebrated Surrealist under the tutelage of her lover, Man Ray, and then joined the war effort during World War II, documenting everything from the liberation of concentration camps to the daily life of Nazi-occupied Paris. Miller was recognized as “one of the most distinguished living photographers” during her hey-day as a fashion photographer, but an astonishing number of these images have remained unpublished. Lee Miller in Fashion is the first book to examine how her career as a model and fashion photographer illuminates her life story and connects to international fashion history from the late 1920s until the early 1950s. The world of fashion emerges as the backbone of Miller’s creative development, as well as an integral lens through which to understand the effects of war on the lives of women in the 1940s and 1950s. Miller witnessed incredible acts of resistance born out through fashion—and her photographic record of women’s indomitable spirit even in times of war has remained an invaluable resource in fashion and global history. Lee Miller in Fashion presents these striking archival fashion photographs as well as contact sheets, memos, and Miller’s published illustrations, vividly setting the wit, irrepressible creativity, and daring of Miller within the larger story of women’s experience of fashion, art, and war in the twentieth century. “In all her different worlds, she moved with freedom. In all her roles, she was her own bold self.” —Antony Penrose

A biography of the elusive but celebrated Dada and Surrealist artist and photographer connecting his Jewish background to his life and art Man Ray (1890–1976), a founding father of Dada and a key player in French Surrealism, is one of the central artists of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most elusive. In this new biography, journalist and critic Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray’s Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art. Man Ray began life as Emmanuel Radnitsky, the eldest of four children born in Philadelphia to a mother from Minsk and a father from Kiev. When he was seven the family moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where both parents worked as tailors. Defying his parents’ expectations that he earn a university degree, Man Ray instead pursued his vocation as an artist, embracing the modernist creed of photographer and avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. When at the age of thirty Man Ray relocated to Paris, he, unlike Stieglitz, made a clean break with his past.

American artist Man Ray spend the most productive years of his career, during the 1920s and 1930s, in Paris.

A trenchant yet sympathetic portrait of Lee Miller, one of the iconic faces and careers of the twentieth century. Carolyn Burke reveals Miller as a multifaceted woman: both model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and mother, and, in later years, gourmet cook—the last of the many dramatic transformations she underwent during her lifetime. A sleek blond bombshell, Miller was part of a glamorous circle in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as a leading Vogue model, close to Edward Steichen, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso. Then, during World War II, she became a war correspondent—one of the first women to do so—shooting harrowing images of a devastated Europe, entering Dachau with the Allied troops, posing in Hitler’s bathtub. Burke examines Miller’s troubled personal life, from the unsettling photo sessions during which Miller, both as a child and as a young woman, posed nude for her father, to her crucial affair with artist-photographer Man Ray, to her unconventional marriages. And through Miller’s body of work, Burke explores the photographer’s journey from object to subject; her eye for form, pattern, and light; and the powerful emotion behind each of her images.A lushly illustrated story of art and beauty, sex and power, Modernism and Surrealism, independence and collaboration, Lee Miller: A Life is an astute study of a fascinating, yet enigmatic, cultural figure.

Published to accompany an exhibition held Feb. 7-May 27, 2013, at the National Portrait Gallery, London; June 22-Sept. 8, 2013, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; Oct. 28, 2013-January 19, 2014, at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

One of the 20th century's most significant photographers, Lee Miller illuminated one of its darkest periods as well as celebrating its creative geniuses. This volume includes many unpublished celebrity portraits, also pictures of war workers, and victims and perpetrators of Nazi oppression. Originally published: 2002.

From Paris in the 1920s to London after the Blitz, two women find that a secret from their past reverberates through years of joy and sorrow.... As recovery from World War II begins, expat American Nora Tours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. There, she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts to survive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter’s life. Lee suffers from what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Nora and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920s Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee’s magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will Nora’s reunion with Lee give them a chance to forgive past betrayals…and break years of silence to forge a meaningful connection as women who have shared the best and the worst that life can offer? A novel of freedom and frailty, desire and daring, The Beautiful American portrays the extraordinary relationship between two passionate, unconventional women. Readers Guide Included

There is the raw edge of combat portrayed at the siege of St. Malo and in the bitterly fought Alsace campaign, and the disbelief and outrage Miller describes on witnessing the victims of Dachau. The war's horror is relieved by the spirit of post-liberation Paris, where she indulged in frivolous fashions and recorded memorable conversations with Picasso, Cocteau, Eluard, Aragon, and Colette. The book ends with Miller's on-the-scene report giving a sardonic description of Hitler's abandoned house in Munich and the looting and burning of his alpine fortress at Berchtesgaden, which marked a symbolic end to the war.