Lee Miller by Carolyn Burke

Author:Carolyn Burke [Burke, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76663-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

David Scherman photographing, c. 1942, (David E. Scherman) (photo credit 11.2)

Their ménage functioned well, due to the mutual respect between Dave and “Rollers,” the young man’s name for Roland. “I was very fond of Dave and admired him greatly,” Roland said, though he recalled his pique on coming home to find their friend’s pajamas under his pillow.48 The trio’s intimacy is palpable in a contemporary photograph, Dave and Roland each in uniform on either side of a barefoot Lee. For a time, Dave’s absorption in Lee blinded him to the situation, in which he was, in a sense, being exploited, while Roland was pleased that Lee had company. She would be less likely to stray, and Dave would look after her during the bombing.

It is also easy to surmise Lee’s feelings for Dave, in whom she gained a brother, a mentor, and a friend, as well as a rapt though inexperienced lover. Judging by his portraits of Lee in her nightgown, gazing at her image in a mirror, the seductive older woman seemed like a goddess. While her poses recall those she struck for Theodore and, later, for Man, the power was now on her side. Yet as well as being Dave’s lover, she was also a friend with a sense of humor like his own. “There was no chi-chi about Lee,” Scherman recalled, “no nonsense, but great fun.”49 (Lee called him her pal—the substitute for the faithful playmate she had had in Erik.)

In exchange for Lee’s lessons in the pleasures of life, her compatriot taught her his approach to photojournalism as a story—“pictorialism with a meaning.”50 Scherman had learned his métier from Life photographers Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt. While he endorsed the “exact instant” approach to photography, as in Robert Capa’s famous shots of the Spanish Civil War, he also believed that if one missed the instant, one might convey its meaning by reframing the shot, or, better yet, faking it. “You invent a good picture,” he explained, often some time after the fact.

The idea of staging a complex image or a narrative sequence appealed to Lee’s sense of the theatrical. Between fashion assignments, she helped Dave “invent” pictures for Life—a “photo-dramatization” of a novel about love in wartime, grimy chimney sweeps posed to dramatize the shortage of soap, scantily clad dancers auctioning lemons to demonstrate the rigors of rationing. This sort of “one-page quickie,” Dave told his brother Bill, was designed to be a Life picture of the week.51 For the lemon auction, he and Lee “cooked it up, painted sign, bought fish-bowl for raffle, etc.… This sort of fakery I have no conscience about.” Most recently, with Lee as lighting expert, he had shot Piccadilly Circus at night from atop a tall building.

Lee also traveled with Dave on two assignments in the country, “England in the Spring” (it rained every day) and “The Horrors of Wartime England”—often climbing up church towers for the best vantage points.52 (In a shot taken from the balcony of a burned-out Bristol theater, a tiny Lee curtsies onstage, beneath the remains of a safety curtain.

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