Contact Sheets Festival #17 – Lee Miller by Jennifer Lesieur

An American living in Paris in the 1930s, Lee Miller (1907–1977) was, in turn, a model and a muse to the Surrealists, before becoming the intrepid war correspondent who photographed Dachau, the liberation of Normandy… before taking a photograph of herself, in 1945, in Hitler’s bath.

A free-spirited woman, driven by her projects and passions, muse and later lover of Man Ray, and a friend of Picasso and Paul Éluard, Lee Miller reinvented her life several times, in New York, in Paris during the golden age of Montparnasse, in Cairo, and then in London in 1939. Through her truly dizzying life, Lee Miller remains one of the great photographers of the 20th century, and a legendary woman. At once indomitable and fragile, committed and whimsical. Throughout her life, she embraced the upheavals of the 20th century, oscillating, in dazzling leaps, from artistic creation to the war-driven madness of men.

The novelist and essayist Jennifer Lesieur, who has previously been a guest at Les Franciscaines with her biography of Rose Valland, has now written a new biography of Lee Miller: *Les Chambres noires de Lee Miller* (published by Robert Laffont).