If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in ![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. ![Shepard Fairey’s “Barack Obama/Hope” image went viral during the 2008 election. Then controversy about the image’s source transformed it into the poster child for fair use in the public debate over copyright and free culture. Now FULAB takes “Hope” as its icon [Image source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/shepard_fairey_hope_2008.jpg "shepard_fairey_hope_2008")
![Charlotte Casiraghi in a red dress. [Source: Stylophile]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/charlotte_casiraghi_red_dress.jpg "Charlotte Casiraghi in a red dress. [Source: Stylophile]")
When I figured out who Charlotte Casiraghi was, I realized that I once sent a poem to her mother. 
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s 
![Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Louvre, Paris. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/delacroix_liberty_1830_2.jpg "Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Louvre, Paris. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]]")
2
October 25, 2007 at 6:31am
by Mark Willis 
Lee Miller, Surrealist muse, photographed by Man Ray, Paris ca. 1930 [Source: NYT]
Janine Di Giovanni encapsulates the Surrealist stretch of Miller’s life in a New York Times T magazine feature:
Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1907, Miller fled her conventional life — and a rather odd father who took photographs of her naked — to model in Manhattan. She was discovered by Condé Nast, but when a portrait of her taken by Edward Steichen was used as a Kotex ad, she ran away to Paris. She was a pupil of Man Ray, who did not take apprentices, but as she told it, she marched into his studio and announced, “I’m your new student.” Over the course of four years, they developed the technique of solarization, and Man Ray became obsessed with her.
She became a muse for the Surrealists, a lover of Picasso and a buddy of Paul Ãluard, Jean Cocteau and others. She played the female lead, a statue, in Cocteau’s film “The Blood of a Poet,” which caused a jealous feud with Man Ray.
Eventually, Miller grew bored of Paris, the parties, the pretty frocks and the promiscuity, and wed an elegant Egyptian, Aziz Eloui Bey. She tried to live a sedate life with him in Cairo. She picked up her camera and photographed the pyramids; did portraits of “the black-satin-and-pearls set,” and most notably took the photo of the desert near Siwa that Magritte saw and used as inspiration for his 1938 painting “Le Baiser.”
But “boredom was starting to creep into her life,” [her son Anthony] Penrose writes. So she bolted for London.
When the war broke out, she was on a ship headed for England. Though women were not technically allowed to be at the front, Miller was British Vogue’s sole accredited correspondent, and she did what she wanted. Besides, as Penrose points out, what soldier could have resisted her?
See Lee Miller: War Photographer and The Lives of Lee Miller.
2 Comments
#1. a blind flaneur 01.21.2008
[...] Miller: Surrealist Muse Lee Miller chased a meteoric trajectory from Surrealist muse to war correspondent for British Vogue. She sneaked a bath in Hitler’s apartment after the fall [...]
#2. Was Man Ray’s “Emak-Bakia” the “Avatar” of the 1920s? – a blind flaneur 01.06.2010
[...] to The Drifter and the Gypsy for linking to my post on Man Ray’s Surrealist Muse (a photo portrait of Lee Miller) and thus pointing me to “Emak Bakia” (albeit a version with a [...]
Leave a Comment