Lee Miller Surrealism

Lee Miller was born in New York in April of 1907 and passed away in July of 1977 while living in England (Lee Miller Archives). During her life, she worked as a model, muse, photographer, artist, war correspondent, and as a gourmet chef (Lee Miller Archives). Miller was best known for her work in surrealist photography because her pictures were one of a kind. Surrealism was a photographic movement during the 20th century which explored the bizarre, the incongruous, and the irrational (Oxford). The Surrealistic images that Lee Miller photographed between 1944-45 are revolutionary because of their elements of bizarreness, violence, and shock. In terms of surrealism, bizarre means strange and unusual (Oxford). In 1945, Lee Miller took a picture of Irmgard Seefried who was an opera singer at the time. In the picture you can see Irmgard singing in an opera house which has been completely destroyed by the war. The picture of the opera singer creates a surrealist element of bizarreness because Irmgard is singing in the opera house as though …show more content…
This set the scene for a wide variety of surrealist photos that contained the element of violence to be taken. In 1945 while in Dachau, Germany, Miller took a picture called Dead SS Prison Guard Floating in Canal. In the photo, a dead guard is seen floating peacefully on his side in a canal toward what looks like a patch of light. This photo has the surrealist element of violent due to the death of the guard. The picture is surrealistic because the guard looks as though he is dreaming which decreases the amount of violence that should actually be in the photo. The short film Surrealist Photography points out that “Photography is not the true image of reality it claims to be.” (Surrealist Photography, 2009). By altering the reality of photos Lee Miller is able to create that element of violence in her surrealist photos which make her