Hans Rustad Lee Miller ville være en av gutta. Hun ville bli anerkjent for sitt håndverk, ikke sin kropp, og likevel figurerer den bokstavtaelig talt prominent i hennes liv.
Hun dukker opp av to grunner: først via en ny utstilling om May Ray i London: Man Ray: Portraits is on at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until May 27. Ray var den som lærte opp Miller til å bli fotograf. De var også par i tre år.
Den andre grunnen til at hun får oppmerksomhet, er at det er funnet tusenvis av hittil ukjente foto som hun tok, mange fra annen verdenskrig. Og de vil i nærmeste fremtid bli gjort tilgjengelig på nett.
her son, Antony Penrose, has announced the discovery of thousands of her hitherto unseen negatives at the family farmhouse in Sussex where — as Lady Penrose — she lived until her death from cancer in 1977.
Available online from the end of next month, and including shots of the liberation of Paris in 1944,
I tillegg kommer nye detaljer om hennes liv: Miller var tøff og trivdes best blant soldatene ved fronten. Men da krigen var over, trakk hun seg tilbake til landsbyliv i Wales og fotograferte aldri mer. Hvorfor?
En bredt anlagt artikkel i Daily Mail avslører at hun ble voldtatt kun syv år gammel, at forholdet aldri ble anmeldt, og at hun hadde et forhold til sin far som kan tyde på uklare grenser. Det er sønnen Antony Penrose som nå skriver bok om morens liv.
When Antony Penrose began writing a biography of his mother after her death, he discovered a secret that she had taken to her grave.
Her brothers, Erik and John, revealed that in 1914, when Lee was seven, she was sent to stay with family friends near New York while her mother, Florence, was ill in hospital. While there, she was raped and infected with gonorrhoea — apparently by a male friend or relative of the family she was staying with.
Mysteriously, no action was taken against the perpetrator, presumably for fear of an ensuing scandal. This is perhaps understandable, but much harder to comprehend is her father’s behaviour at this time.
An engineer by training, he was the manager of a large factory in the upstate New York town of Poughkeepsie and was said to have taken advantage of his position by fondling his female employees.
Carolyn Burke suggests that he also had more substantial liaisons with other women and, when he did show an interest in his wife, it was to demand that she should pose naked for him in the name of art.
It was shortly after his daughter’s rape that Theodore, then 43, began taking nude photographs of her, too. The first, posed two weeks short of her eighth birthday in April 1915, shows her standing in the snow outside their house, naked except for her slippers.
That this sudden interest in his daughter’s naked form should coincide with the attack on her naturally leads to suspicion, but Antony Penrose says he has found no evidence to suggest that Theodore was her rapist, or that there was any kind of incestuous relationship between them.
‘The way he photographed her was clearly a transgression of the usual parent-child boundaries,’ he says. ‘But although it wasn’t normal, I don’t think it was harmful.’
He suggests instead that these naked photographs were Theodore’s attempt to restore his daughter’s self-esteem. ‘I believe that it was his way of saying: “We know you have this horrible disease but you are still a beautiful and clean person”.’
If so, it’s difficult to see why her father’s photographic ‘therapy’ should have extended to persuading several
of her school-friends to strip for his camera, too. And despite the unbroken bond with Theodore, Lee later seems to have been uncomfortable about these shoots, particularly as she grew into an astoundingly beautiful woman.
Once, when she was 19, Theodore took her to some secluded countryside outside Poughkeepsie to pose as a woodland nymph.This was at around the time that Lee, who could never bring herself to discuss the rape with anyone, tried to confide the obliquest of references to it in her journal.
This left her in tears and feeling ‘the nearest to suicide I have ever been’, and her turmoil is perhaps reflected in those pastoral photographs.
I våre dager rommer Millers liv alle ingredienser til å bli noe vi fråtser i: det seksuelle overgrepet, tilknytningen til kjente kulturpersonligheter, og den seksuelle eksperimenteringen. Men kanskje denne hadde en pris? Da hun ble sammen med den engelske aristokraten Roland Penrose, og de møtte Pablo Picasso, sa Penrose at han ikke hadde noe imot det om de delte kvinne, et tilbud Picasso begjærlig grep. Det kan hende at dette grensesprengende levesettet, kombinert med grensesprengnde opplevelser – Buchenwald, f.eks. –, ble for mye for et sinn.
Miller erkjente selv at hun led av depresjoner etter krigen. Derfor ble det heller ikke noe mer.
Biografene går på jakt etter en stor, mørk hemmelighet. Det virker å ha vært mange i Millers liv.
Nevnte Carolyn Burke har skrevet Lee Miller: A Life.
