How Lee Miller went from supermodel to celebrated war photographer

Lee Miller posed for a photograph in the bathtub as the sweat and dirt of weeks of war washed off her. This was no ordinary bathroom: It was the personal sanctuary of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who died of suicide that very day in Berlin.

Miller, a war photographer, had entered Hitler’s Munich home as Allied forces battled their way through Germany, and the improbable photo of an American bombshell bathing in the Führer’s personal tub became one of the most indelible images of the waning days of World War II.

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As a former model, Miller knew how to work her best angle. But the image buried the complexity of its subject—a muse, a hard-working artist, and a groundbreaking photographer in her own right whose life story is now being told in a biopic starring Kate Winslet.

Here’s how Elizabeth “Lee” Miller broke boundaries in front of and behind the lens, from the pages of Vogue to the battlefields of Europe.

An unconventional model

Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, to a well-to-do family in 1907. Her early life was traumatic, from struggles in school to a childhood rape that resulted in her contracting gonorrhea—then a stigmatized and nearly incurable condition—when she was just seven years old. Her family relationships were also fraught; her father, Theodore, was an amateur photographer and used her as a nude model throughout her childhood and teenage years.

By the time she was 18, Miller was ambitious, jaw-droppingly beautiful, and eager to break with conventional norms. She moved to New York City to pursue art, acting, and modeling.

As luck—or shrewd planning—would have it, she soon got her big break when she was rescued from an oncoming car by none other than legendary Vogue publisher Condé Nast, the most influential man in the fashion industry. The incident soon became the stuff of fashion legend; art historian Patricia Allmer calls her stepping in front of the car a possibly “conscious decision” as Miller likely knew who Nast was and was eager to catch his eye. Soon, Miller was an established fashion model.

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In 1929, Miller’s career took a turn when her photograph appeared aside ad copy for Kotex tampons. It was the first time a recognizable woman had posed in an ad for menstrual products—scandalous at the time—and all but ended Miller’s days as a mainstream fashion model. She turned to doing behind-the-scenes work for Vogue, and in 1929 headed to Europe for a research project.

It was there that she decided to become a photographer.

A Surrealist muse and burgeoning photographer

In Europe, Miller swiftly determined to apprentice herself to one of the best-known artists in France, American expatriate and Surrealist photographer Man Ray. She boldly introduced herself to the older photographer in his Paris studio and swiftly became his apprentice, lover, and muse.

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Even as Ray’s photography turned Miller’s body into one of the Surrealist movement’s most recognizable figures, she became a sharp photographer in her own right. Miller collaborated with other artists like Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, and she used innovative photographic and innovative techniques like solarization—when you overexpose film to reverse tones, creating an otherworldly effect—to further her own art.

In the early 1930s, Miller moved back to New York, established her own photography studio, and began exhibiting her work. After a brief marriage to Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, Miller met Surrealist photographer Roland Penrose, whom she followed to England and eventually married.

While living with Penrose in London, World War II broke out and Miller took on a new boundary-breaking job—war correspondent for Vogue.

A boundary-breaking war photographer

At the time, most war correspondents were men. Miller brought both a Surrealist’s lens and a woman’s eye to her work, documenting the Blitz as she helped expand the concept of what a fashion magazine could cover. After D-Day, she went to the European continent, photographing active battle against the wishes of American officials who didn’t want a woman at the front lines.

To get closer to the front, Miller teamed up with her friend and on-and-off lover Dave Scherman, an accredited photographer for LIFE magazine. “She was the only dame…who stayed through the siege of Saint-Malo,” Scherman later wrote. He came to admire her grit and determination, and together they followed the Allied forces as they battled their way toward Germany.

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It was Scherman who snapped the photograph of Miller bathing in Hitler’s bathtub just days after they ventured into the Dachau concentration camp with Allied forces. It’s not clear whose idea it was to pose Miller’s boots, filthy with dirt from the mass graves she’d just photographed, on the once pristine rug in front of the tub.

Miller would stay in Europe to photograph the aftermath of the war too, producing memorable images of the war’s effect on women and children and continuing to perfect her techniques. But post-traumatic stress, motherhood, and the end of the excitement of war photography all took their toll. Miller suffered from bouts of mental illness and developed a problem with alcohol.

Though Miller’s profile faded in the postwar years, writes Allmer, her legendary fall into obscurity is just that—a myth. In fact, Miller kept busy after the war, becoming a noted gourmet cook, photographing her friend Pablo Picasso, and remaining active in the art world. As an “active, self-determining woman artist,” Allmer says, Miller never truly faded—just transformed into a new version of her uncompromisingly modern self. She died of lung cancer at age 70.

Today, thanks largely to the advocacy of her son, who preserved tens of thousands of her photographs and wrote her first biography, Miller’s legacy continues to influence the worlds of fashion, photography, and art.

“The personality of the photographer, his approach, is really more important than his technical genius,” Miller once said. Thankfully, Miller had both—and with recent biographies and the Winslet-helmed biopic, a new generation will get to know the elusive, ambitious innovator.