Edward Steichen took this photo of Miller and sold it to Kotex, making her the first actual person to appear in an ad for menstrual hygiene (above, in McCall's magazine [U.S.A.], July 1928.  She had signed the model release, so it was legal, but she was mortified, as were many Americans. 

The fuss across the country about these ads may have contributed to lee leaving New York for the more sophisticated life in Paris where she became a muse for photographers and artists, including being featured in a painting by Picasso. As the lover of American Surrealist painter and photographer Man Ray, she worked with him to develope solarisation, a surrealist technique exposing a negative to create a halo effect.

Due to copyright restrictions, I'm unable to include many photos of, or by Lee Miller. You can see some here... 

​​​​​​​Female war correspondent Lee Miller who covered the U.S. Army in the European Theater during World War II (U.S. Army Center of Military History)
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Her first experience of battle must have been harrowing and abhorrent, but she did not stint in reporting what she saw. In part, her article for British Vogue read:

"My heel ground into a dead detached hand … and I cursed the Germans for the sordid, ugly destruction they had conjured up in this once-beautiful town. I wondered where my friends were … that I’d known here before the war … how many had been forced into disloyalty and degradation … how many had been shot, starved or what. I picked up the hand and hurled it across the street and ran back the way I’d come, bruising my feet and crashing in the unsteady piles of stone and slipping in blood. Christ, it was awful."

One of only four female photojournalists accredited to the US armed forces, Lee documented the liberation of France, Belgium and Luxembourg before accompanying the American advance into Germany. 

Photo of Lee Miller embedded with American troops in Europe.

On April 30, 1945, Miller and fellow war correspondent David E. Scherman arrived at Dachau the morning after the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions had liberated the concentration camp.

In escaping the camp days before, SS guards had abandoned a trainload of prisoners on the tracks. Lee was there as US soldiers opened the locked cars to find some of the prisoners had been shot to death, but most had died of thirst or suffocated. 

Lee photographed a few of the 2,300 corpses on the train and many of the camp prisoners, emaciated and near death. Her photos were heart-rending, raw and unflinching. She cabled Vogue: “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE”. 

Kate Winslet, who worked eight years to get the film about Lee made says: People didn’t know what had happened to six million individuals, and Lee was there on the day that they uncovered those atrocities. And to have the courage and determination, and grace that she did to honor the victims’ stories is just absolutely extraordinary.

In the article Lee cabled to Vogue she juxtaposed photos from the camp with those of German citizens living nearby; pictures of children playing next to photos of human bone fragments, beautiful villages next to the crematoria used to burn the bodies of camp inmates. Alongside the photos, phrases like, “GERMANS ARE LIKE THIS.”

Her pictures presented a stark contrast to sanitized images like those staged by the U.S. Army as propaganda showing cheering prisoners and healthy-looking children who were minority at the camp. Most of the survivors didn't have the strength to stand on their feet.

US Soldiers and medical staff inspect a typhus ward at the Dachau concentration camp.

Leaving Dachau, Lee and her friend and fellow correspondent David E. Scherman of LIFE magazine proceeded to Munich where they sneaked their way into Hitler's apartment. 

Commandeered as a US command post, the journalists found soldiers causally using Hitler's bathroom. It was the first time in six weeks, Lee and David have a chance to use the bathroom and wash up. It one of the most memorable scenes in the movie and produced an iconic image of Lee. 

Lee ran a bath in the tub, got in, naked, and insisted Scherman photograph her. He did the same and she snapped his picture, too, but that one is not as famous.

“She understood the meaning of being able to stomp her dirt and mud-laden boots on Hitler’s prissy bathmat—it was the mud of Dachau, which she had just seen and witnessed,” Director of Lee Ellen Kuras says. “Lee Miller had a great sense of irony. Even though we may not have seen that in photographs, we wanted to be able to capture that [in the movie].”

At the end of WWII, Lee remained in Europe for a time photographing civilians attempting to put their lives in order. When she returned to England, she collapsed with exhaustion. After recovering, she continued working for Vogue for a time, but like many women in England and the US, she found it difficult to assimilate into the postwar world. 

In his biography of his mother, Antony Penrose suggests that the end of the war and a return to fashion journalism, disheartened Lee more than the gunshots and death scenes.

Lee married her pre-war lover Ronald Penrose in 1947 and moved to Farleys Farmhouse at Muddles Green, East Sussex. Suffering PTSD and increasingly reliant on alcohol, she threw herself into renovating the creaky 18th-Century house, growing vegetables and cooking.

"Food rationing was on till 1954, so the first five years at Farleys were spent cooking like fury and carting a whole lot of stuff up to London to distribute among friends," Antony explains. "For my parents, it was really important that they had vegetables. They’d knock over a pig and get the pig cut up… and then there'd be milk, and they'd try to make butter and cheese and so on. It was a real focus for Lee; she used all her skills and ingenuity in the purpose of feeding people.

"She had witnessed the most appalling scenes of mass starvation that you can imagine. She had been at the liberation of four concentration camps where people were more like skeletons than human beings, and I think that touched her very deeply. She was very concerned about people's welfare in general but feeding people in particular."

In later years, Lee trained at Le Cordon Bleu London and took great pleasure whipping up original, surreal dishes for visitors at Farleys including blue spaghetti and a chicken entre with so many herbs it was green.

Lee lived with her family in the English countryside until her death in 1977. 

After acting in and producing Lee, Kate Winslet says, “She went to war as a flawed, complicated, and determined middle-aged woman. She redefines femininity for me to mean resilience, courage, compassion, and strength.”

Go see the movie. It'll tell you parts I left out.

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