Art: Photographs by Lee Miller, skewed, startling

Lee Miller's life story would make a wonderfully weepy and inspirational Hollywood movie - if Hollywood still made such pictures. Sexually assaulted at age 7, photographed nude by her father when she was a teenager and a young woman, she went on to become, in turn, a fashion model, artist's muse, photographer, war correspondent, writer and, finally, a gourmet cook. She also was a mother, once, but apparently she wasn't very skilled at mothering.

Such a juicy, novelistic biography can easily overshadow, or substitute for, artistic achievement. Miller's resumé was bound to make her legendary on some level, but what concerns us today is what she accomplished as a photographer. A retrospective exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art invites us to evaluate just how good she was behind the camera rather than in front of it.

This show of more than 140 photographs and objects, including some pictures of her by others, was organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to mark the centennial of her birth in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1907. Miller lived the last chapter of her life in England as the wife of painter, collector and writer Sir Roland Penrose.

It's often difficult to assess the work of an artist who has become famous for other reasons, a situation that seems to be more common with women. Frida Kahlo, whose show opened at the Art Museum on Feb. 20, is a prime example. So is Lee Krasner, wife of Jackson Pollock, and Elsie Driggs, who was married to a more renowned painter, Lee Gatch.

One is inclined to give such artists the benefit of the doubt. In Miller's case, it wasn't her fault that she was tall, blond and beautiful, and that consequently men found her attractive. Man Ray, for instance - the expatriate American Dadaist took her on as a "student" in 1929; not surprisingly, she became his model and lover as well.

Her association with Man Ray, which lasted about three years, turned her into a photographer. The solarization technique she used in some of her portraits was developed in his studio. (Solarization produces a dense black outline around the body while washing out the background.)

Her time in Paris also must have introduced her to the French master Eugène Atget, because many of her early street photographs exhibit an analogous strangeness and stillness.

It's hard to tell whether Miller was a born surrealist or whether she picked up this slightly skewed way of seeing the world from her mentors and the Paris zeitgeist; she was there when surrealism was in full bloom.

Yet the exhibition leaves no doubt that she possessed an acute surrealist eye. It reveals itself throughout her career, in all types of photographs from formal portraits to street scenes and landscapes, even in photographs that she made as a correspondent for British Vogue in World War II.

Miller's eye wasn't afraid to shock; a photograph of two surgically severed breasts - the aftermath of a mastectomy - and another of a dead German SS guard floating in a canal testify to that.

Her capacity to startle is perhaps her most distinctive quality; see, for example, the small, enigmatic picture of a hand with spread fingers juxtaposed against an inflated condom. While she made a number of memorable images, and while she was an accomplished professional, not a talented dilettante, she could not in good conscience be characterized as an innovator. I don't recall seeing one photograph in the show that could be hers and no one else's.

As noted, work from the Paris years can remind one of Atget and Man Ray. Her portrait style, which developed in New York during the 1930s, isn't as distinctive as that of near-contemporary Nickolas Muray (whose portraits of Frida Kahlo, in color and black-and-white, are being exhibited at the Delaware Art Museum through March 30).

Miller's war pictures are occasionally intrepid - she got close enough to falling bombs in France to capture the explosive clouds - but sometimes she was self-indulgent, as when she photographed herself with Picasso in his Paris studio. Yet even during the war surrealism never entirely disappeared from her work, as evidenced by a picture of two women wearing fire masks and goggles that make them look sinister.

Miller's strongest pictures are those in which the surrealist spirit is the most intense, such as a scene made under an urban overpass in which a procession of thick zebra-stripe shadows transforms an ordinary street into an oppressive, dungeonlike cavern. She achieved a similar effect with an angled shot of lifeboats hanging in their davits.

Her most famous and iconic surrealist photo is

Portrait of Space,

a view of an Egyptian desert landscape seen through a torn window screen. Like all her surrealist prints, this is a found image, cropped for dramatic effect. She plucked her eccentricities from nature rather than creating them in a studio. In fact, it's more accurate to say that she observed slight distortions of reality and magnified their oddness in the way she framed them in her camera.

Such encounters could become formalist studies, like deep ripples in sand at the Red Sea or patterns in a pool of tar on the street. Miller's eye for subject matter was omnivorous, which is one reason this show holds one's attention from beginning to end.

Even landscapes made when she was living in Egypt confirm her ability to find surreal grace notes in unlikely locations. A photo made from the top of the Great Pyramid, in which the massive monolith casts its triangular shadow over a settlement, is mildly threatening.

Nearby, in a more whimsical vein, is a print of burlap bags leaking tendrils of raw cotton juxtaposed against fleecy clouds, a scene that Alfred Stieglitz himself might have composed when he was doing the cloud studies he called "equivalents."

The deeper one proceeds into the exhibition, the more Miller's unconventional (for her time) life fades into the background, and ceases to factor into one's appreciation of her obvious talent. She might have been blond and sensual, but her penetrating eye made her a photographer of genuine stature, if not of major influence.

"The Art of Lee Miller" continues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, through April 27. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and to 8:45 p.m. Fridays. Admission is $14 general, $12 for visitors 62 and older, and $10 for students with ID and visitors 13 to 18. Pay what you wish Sundays. Information: 215-763-8100, 215-684-7500 or

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