Mardi 28 Juillet 2015 10:29:57 par Louise Horvath dans Expositions

Lee Miller (1907-1977) is considered one of the most fascinating artists of the 20th century. In only 16 years, she produced a diverse body of photographic work of a range that remains unparalleled, and that unites the most divergent genres. Miller’s oeuvre extends from surrealistic images to photography in the fields of travelling, portraiture and even war correspondence; the Albertina presents a survey of the work in its breadth and depth, with the aid of 100 selected pieces.

Irmgard Seefried, Opera Singer, Singing an Aria from Madame Butterfly,
Vienna Opera House, Vienna, Austria - 1945
© Lee Miller Archives England 2015.

 

Lee Miller began her artistic career as a surrealist photographer in the Paris of 1929. Frequently working in collaboration with Man Ray, Miller produced images in which she alienated motifs by using narrow image frames and applying experimental techniques like solarization; in this manner, she could draw back the curtain on a reality of paradoxes, making them visible to the viewer. Miller similarly manifested the surrealist viewpoint on the streets of Paris, where she was struck by the absurdity found in everyday motifs, a phenomenon she would likewise unmask in subsequent photograph portraits taken at her New York photography studio starting in 1932, the era of the Great Depression. Miller remained in the USA only briefly. In 1934, she booked passage to Egypt, where she created travel photographs in which landscape is translated into modernist and ambiguous shapes. Egypt would only serve as another way station on her life's journey. In 1938, she moved back to England. These biographical aspects are indeed essential to an understanding of Miller’s photographic work; as they are inextricably linked to her yearning for autonomy. As one of just a handful of female photojournalists, she began to photograph the disastrous consequences of the Second World War as early as in 1940. Miller photographed the attack on London by the German Luftwaffe ("the Blitz"), as well as the eventual liberation of Paris. One particularly famous portrait, in which she is seen posing nude in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub, was made on her trip to Munich in 1945 – just after Miller, as one of the first photojournalists on the scene, chronicled evidence of the harrowing atrocities committed at recently liberated concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald.

Lee Miller in Hitler´s Bathtub, Munich, Germany - 1945
© Lee Miller Archives England 2015.

Her reporting led her to Vienna via Salzburg in 1945, where she photographed a cityscape destroyed by war, along with the hardships at children's hospitals. The special focus of this exhibition is on this largely unpublished group of works. In conjunction with the exhibition Lee Miller, the Albertina will also be opening its new, 450-square-meter Galleries for Photography. From this point onward, the museum will be devoting these exhibition spaces exclusively to the presentation of photography.