Lee Miller, the photojournalist who brought dignity to those who suffered during WWII

For the past decade, British actress Kate Winslet, 49, had been patiently deciding which of Lee Miller’s three life stages she wanted to portray. On March 7, 2025, the film Lee was finally released in Spain, after a 2023 premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. Directed by Ellen Kuras, it stars Winslet, who’s also one of the producers. In the prologue to the book Lee Miller: Photographs (2023), by Antony Penrose, the actress writes: “Lee Miller was a woman who made things happen [...] I wouldn’t have made the film if I didn’t feel such a deep passion for it. [As for] Lee... I couldn’t get her out of my head.”

Winslet faced years of financial challenges to make the movie happen, according to an interview she gave to Vanity Fair, which was published on March 9.

The feature film focuses on Miller’s time working as a war correspondent, when she was armed with her Rolleiflex camera for Vogue magazine. But before becoming a photojournalist, she was a model: first for her father, then for Vogue and Vanity Fair, owned by Condé Montrose Nast. In 1927, the media mogul saved Miller from being hit by a car. That life-saving encounter led to a modeling career that was short-lived, due to the controversy that followed some photos of her advertising feminine sanitary products in the spring of 1929.

After Miller’s interest in modeling and painting waned, she felt that photography could offer her an exciting experience. So, she moved to Paris and insisted on becoming a student of Man Ray, a renowned surrealist photographer. At first, he didn’t want to take her on as a student. But, in the end, they spent three years together as teacher and pupil… and also as lovers. Together, this artistic couple discovered the photographic technique of solarization. Miller learned so much and so quickly from Ray that she opened her own photography studio.

Before the outbreak of World War II, she met Roland Penrose, who became her lover and, later, her husband. Instead of returning to the United States, she stayed in Europe. In London, she tried to return to work for Vogue as a photographer… something she had done previously thanks to Ray’s connections.

In her new role, her photographs transcended handbags and shoes: she didn’t ignore the material and human damage caused by Adolf Hitler’s dehumanization. After London was bombed, Miller took to the streets and used the rubble that the British capital had become as a backdrop for her models. Dissatisfied with the texts that accompanied her photographs, she began writing them herself. In this way, her reports went beyond fashion: she began to investigate other topics, such as the work of American nurses and that of female searchlight operators. Dozens of rolls of film and thousands of words would follow, eloquently portraying and recounting field medicine, war, and the suffering of civilians.

In 1942, she wanted to become an accredited war correspondent, something that was unattainable for a woman at the time. She met a young man who became her co-worker in covering the war: Life magazine photojournalist David E. Scherman. Thanks to her American citizenship and her status as a photojournalist — and with a little support from Scherman — Miller obtained a permit from the U.S. army that allowed her access to the military zone. Officially accredited and armed with her Rolleiflex camera and her surreal photographic eye, she portrayed the horror as closely as she could.

Regarding Miller’s photographs, Winslet writes, in the aforementioned prologue: “What’s extraordinary about them is that very few of them are war photographs [in the style that] one might expect.”

In late July of 1944, after D-Day, Miller was at La Cambe, on Omaha Beach in Normandy. In addition to covering the field hospital that treated wounded soldiers at the rear of the battlefield, she worked at an evacuation post for the wounded on the front lines. From Saint-Malo, she went to Paris, which was liberated from the Nazis on August 24, 1944. But the worst came at the end of her journey.

In April of 1945, Miller and Scherman arrived just a few days after the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration and extermination camps, near Weimar and Dachau. Miller’s photographs spoke for her, because, for a long time, she wasn’t able to describe what she had seen… although she never forgot the nauseating smell. She photographed the gas chambers, the morgue with its piles of unburned bodies, as well as the huts where the living lay next to the corpses, too weak to move. In Germany’s concentration and extermination camps, she became aware of the true magnitude of the war. From then on, she was never the same woman.

The night of the same day they were in Dachau was spent in Hitler’s apartment, in nearby Munich. In the bathroom, Miller and Scherman composed a picture. With her camera, he photographed her, naked, in the bathtub. In the same photo, you can see her boots, soiled by the Dachau dust. “David and Lee agreed that a photograph isn’t just taken: it’s made. They both arranged things, moved them around, to create a better image,” Winslet explains in her prologue.

In mid-May, Miller and Scherman’s paths diverged. He returned to New York, while she continued eastward, visiting Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest. In 1946, she reunited with Roland Penrose. They married and settled in the English countryside, in a house on the Farley farm, where the protagonist of this story traded photography for cooking. She barely mentioned her traumas, which included having been raped as a child, or her memories of the horrors of World War II, particularly Dachau. She kept these traumas at bay with the help of her intellect, her sense of humor, her Rolleiflex camera and a blender (among other kitchen utensils).

Miller died from pancreatic cancer in 1977. Antony and Ami Bouhassane — her granddaughter — are responsible for safeguarding and publicizing her archive.

Winslet considers the photojournalist’s legacy to be extraordinary. “If we don’t keep making films about people like Lee Miller, how the hell are we ever going to change the culture and people’s attitudes towards complex, interesting women who have lived lives and wear all of their marks and their scars on their faces?” she asked, in her interview with Vanity Fair.

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