MAN RAY'S MUSE, OF COURSE, BUT ALSO BRILLIANT PHOTOGRAPHER, WHO WAS NOT AFRAID TO EXPERIMENT IN THE DARKROOM AND ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF WORLD WAR II. ALL THIS COMPOSES THE PORTRAIT OF LEE MILLER, PROTAGONIST OF THE EXHIBITION AT PALAZZO FRANCHETTI IN VENICE.
The audacity that Lee Miller (Poughkeepsie, 1907 - Chiddingly, 1977) brought, only a few women in the thirties could demonstrate, combined with her beauty and intelligence to transform from a simple model into the author of photographic experiments developed alongside her master Man Ray (Philadelphia, 1890 Paris, 1976). This close Parisian collaboration, which also heralds an amour fou (a relationship that lasted a few years and began when Miller proposed herself as a student), is the fruit of the rediscovery of the Sabattier effect. Also called Solarization, for similarity in the results, it is obtained with the exposure to light of films or sensitive paper being developed, with the result of intensifying the lines and creating an emphasis in the chiaroscuro.
LEE MILLER AND PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPERIMENTATION
Whether it was an accidental lighting of the light or not, Lee Miller did not limit himself to the quality of the shot, but also to the experimentation in the darkroom, which already for Man Ray was a fundamental step to transfer in his photography the effects of surreality, suspension and alienation through new techniques: direct imprinting of sensitive paper with rayographs, irregular degreasing with silver powders, distortions. All explorations with poetic and dreamlike effects, and a new way to use light. On the theme of light Miller developed Electricité, a work of ten rayographies signed by Man Ray for the nascent French electricity company, and that only recently can be attributed to the photographer who made them.
LEE MILLER AND MAN RAY IN VENICE
The first room of the exhibition at Palazzo Franchetti in Venice summarizes the meaning of the exhibition, which features the story of a love, an artistic exchange and a woman in the conquest of emancipation: a short excerpt from the film Le sang d'un poete by Jean Cocteau, where Lee Miller lends her lips to give voice to a Greek statue, solarization in her fashion photo, and always she who appears in the shots of Man Ray as a model, as a symbol of essential beauty, where the female nude turns into a research of lines.
PHOTOGRAPHY ACCORDING TO LEE MILLER
Over a hundred photographs testify to Miller’s desire to no longer be just part of an image but to give life to his ideas quickly, finding in the practice of shooting an immediate satisfaction and resorting spontaneously to surrealist themes. Her energy will lead her to accept assignments of different kinds: portrait painter, fashion photographer, war photojournalist. Capturing the frantic activities in the military hospitals during World War II and the prisoners who had just been released from the Dachau camp was for her a no-half measures encounter with reality. The discomfort in the face of so much destruction and violence, however, allowed her to give shape to shots passed to history, thanks to the ability to outline, in addition to beauty, the contours of horror.