LEE MILLER

Among the most iconic and acclaimed photojournalists and correspondents of the Second World War, Miller went from the front page of Vogueto the frontline of the Normandy invasion

- MARIANNA BUKOWSKI

Model. Surrealist. Photographer. World War II correspondent. Lee Miller's life reads like a M masterclass in living several different lives in one lifetime. "She was the nearest thing I knew to a mid-20th century Renaissance woman," said fellow World War II photojournalist David E Scherman. Perhaps her most remarkable work is from her time as a World War II photojournalist and correspondent, documenting women's war effort in Britain, the Siege of St Malo, the Alsace Campaign and the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.

A fractured childhood

Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller was born on 23 April 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, to Florence and Theodore Miller. Growing up on a farm provided near endless possibilities for adventure and Theodore, a mechanical engineer, would treat Lee the same as her two brothers, encouraging their shared interests in science and machinery. Lee's favourite toy was a chemistry set, and she was soon introduced to photography when her father installed a darkroom in a cupboard underneath the stairs. Yet Lee's childhood was to end abruptly. At the age of seven she was sexually assaulted, by a family acquaintance. The trauma was to be further aggravated, as the perpetrator infected Lee with gonorrhoea - a venereal disease for which the medical treatment at the time consisted of numerous acid irrigations, administered daily for a year. "It changed her whole life and attitude," her brother, the aviation pioneer John Miller, recalled years later. "She went wild."