Lee Miller
Lee Miller is the feminist icon at the center of The Lives of Lee Miller. A former fashion model, Miller was born in New York in 1907. Her father, a photographer by trade, took nude photographs of his daughter from a young age, igniting her modeling career.
fter having a successful modeling career for years, Miller moved to Paris, where she became interested in photography. She became an apprentice to one of that country's great photographers, with whom she honed her craft and helped to re-popularize several techniques. She spent several decades after that as a sought-after fashion photographer, often creating photo portraits of important figures.
But after the outbreak of World War II (Miller lived in London during the start of the war and during the start of the London Blitz campaign with her second husband, Ronald Penrose), Miller felt a call to action and took as a job as Vogue's war correspondent. Miller's goal in the war was to "document war as historical evidence." As a result, she took some of the most stark images of the war, often ignoring established rules and procedures to do so (and putting her own life on the line). She was one of the first female war correspondents, blazing a path for women across the world.
Antony Penrose
Antony Penrose is the author of the book and Lee Miller's son, who is largely responsible for bringing her name into the public consciousness. Penrose is a photographer himself. In the book, he often takes a critical eye of his mother's work, arguing that she was a talented photographer who didn't get her due because she was a woman. He likewise argued that her work was on the same level as (or better than) any man. Perhaps most importantly though, in his mother Penrose saw one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, something he has spent much of his life trying to argue for since he found a stache of her photographers in an attic.
Miller was Penrose's first mentor and the reason he got into photography. Throughout his early life until his mother's death in the 1970s, the two frequently went on photography trips together, bonding over their shared passion of the arts. And like his mother, Penrose had a fondness for artists like Picasso, whom he photographed on several occasions.
Unlike his mother, though, Penrose has dabbled in film. He has been critically important in the creation of a number of films, but most prominently documentary films, something which he has always been passionate about. As of 2024, he is still alive and has a daughter, whom he works with the preserve the legacy of his mother.
Adolf Hitler
During the outbreak of World War II, Lee Miller felt compelled to join the war effort and photograph Nazi atrocities. Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nazi party, and organized the London Blitz and the Buchenwald Concentration Camp (both of which Miller photographed). In one of her most famous photographs, in fact, Miller sat in a bathtub right next to a photo of Hitler, reinforcing their adversarial relationship.
Hitler is regarded as one of the most evil men in history. He was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people as a result of his reckless and genocidal policies, and for instigating the outbreak of World War II. In many ways, he is the antagonist of the book; Miller went to war as a result of Hitler.
