Lee Miller, glamorous photographs from the pages of Vogue at the Dachau concentration camp

Model silhouette, photographer’s eye, muse of the surrealists and reporter: these are the thousand lives of Lee Miller. In the 1930s, she lived in Paris and rubbed shoulders with the surrealists. She is Man Ray’s mistress, and Cocteau had her pose as a plaster statue for the cinema. She discovers with these artists the freedom to think. But it is in New York, in the United States, that she will best express her independence. She creates her own studio there and shakes up the imagery of Vogue magazine.

Lee Miller draws his strength of character from his youth. Her childhood was shattered by a rape, but she was able to count on a loving and modern family. “Girls were raised to cook, to be good mothers. But they [les] encouraged to make inventions, they always treated them on the same level as [l]are brothers“, says Ami Bouhassane, the granddaughter of Lee Miller.

In September 1944, she accompanied the troops who liberated Europe from the Nazis. She photographed women shaved because of romantic relationships with the Germans, and will be one of the first to enter the concentration camps.