Oscar-worthy 'Lee' sheds light on untold stories
The story of the famous model, and later photojournalist, who was one of the first to document up close, among other things, the horrors of German concentration camps, isn’t very popular. And it’s a shame because it’s a film worth watching with an Oscar-worthy performance by Kate Winslet and excellent cinematography by Paweł Edelman.
20 September 2024 18:39
The extremely beautiful Elizabeth Miller, called simply Lee by those close to her, was an American. She was born in 1907. At the age of twenty, she began her career as a model. She was photographed by the greatest artists of the interwar period, but she quickly grew tired of this role. Instead of being photographed, she preferred to photograph; instead of posing, she preferred to create. She then went to Paris, where she began learning photography under the surrealist and dadaist Man Ray. She was also a muse for, among others, Pablo Picasso.
The outbreak of World War II found her in London, where she was collaborating with the famous magazine "Vogue." As Europe was plunged into nightmare and chaos, Miller did not want to observe events from a safe distance. The conservative British disagreed for a woman to become a war correspondent, but the Americans saw no significant obstacles.
Director Ellen Kuras at last year’s Toronto Film Festival said that with her pictures, she had given a voice to those who had been deprived of it. She was the only one allowed into the women's section of the military barracks, where she took, among other images, the famous photo of drying women's underwear. She also took a picture of Ania Leska, one of three Polish women serving in the British Auxiliary Air Force.
Miller was also one of the first photojournalists to document up close the sacrifices of soldiers, the suffering of civilians, and the horrors of German concentration camps. This was highlighted in Ellen Kuras' film. No substitute terms were used when the woman was one of the first people to enter the liberated Dachau. We hear from the screen, "German death camps."
Lee Miller's photo reports showing piles of skeletal human remains became one of the most shocking testimonies of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, British censorship blocked most of Lee's photos, especially those documenting the slaughter in the concentration camps. The then-editor-in-chief of "Vogue" sent them to the American editorial office. Based on them, in June 1945, they published a shocking photo report, which was one of the first to reveal to the world the scale of German crimes.
