Majas nro.37 - Lee Miller

 Lee’s upbringing and a progressive family legacy

At about age seven, Lee visited family friends in New York City. While there, she was sexually assaulted and contracted syphilis. She had to undergo painful, caustic lavage treatments for years, and her doctor and family attempted to put the event in the context that sexual contact is not what love is about.

In 1915, when Lee was eight, her father, Theodore, photographed her in the nude standing in the snow and called the shot “December Morn” as a take-off of the popular 1911 painting “September Morn” by Paul Emile Chabas depicting a young nude woman standing in the shallow water of a lake.

Writers have noted that it appeared odd that Lee’s father would pose his sexually abused daughter as an innocent nymph just a year after the traumatic event. He was and had been regularly taking nude photographs of her even before the incident. This practice continued throughout Lee’s adolescence and young adulthood. There are comments that his behavior was abhorrent. However, there may be a very different and positive side to this particular behavior.

Lee was born in 1907. Theodore enjoyed taking stereopticon photographs like the two below, where, if you focus your eyes between the images so they overlap, they then form a 3D result. Typically, there were viewers with lens to assist with this, but with practice you can see these very nicely off a printed page.

https://www.planetnude.co/p/lee-miller-growing-up-nude-along

Primeros años de vida

El primer encuentro de Miller con la fotografía fue con su padre, Theodore. Fotógrafo aficionado, poseía una Kodak Brownie y un estereoscopio, tenía un cuarto oscuro en casa y le enseñó los fundamentos del oficio. En apariencia, Miller tuvo una infancia privilegiada y feliz. Sin embargo, se vio obligada a lidiar con las repercusiones psicológicas y físicas de haber sido violada por un amigo de la familia a los siete años mientras visitaba a unos familiares. La agresión la dejó no solo traumatizada, sino también con gonorrea , una enfermedad que en ese momento se trataba con procedimientos invasivos y que sufrió con cierta regularidad durante su edad adulta. Su padre también la obligó a posar desnuda para fotografías, y continuó haciéndolo hasta los 20 años, creando imágenes que parecen perturbadoras e inapropiadas.

https://www-britannica-com.translate.goog/biography/Lee-Miller

In these shots, Lee is twenty-one in the top photo and nineteen in the lower one. Theodore also was known to have photographed his wife Florence in the nude and described it as art. Photography was just beginning to move from just documenting scenes to becoming a form of expressive art.