A ripped mesh sheath unveils a dry, desolate landscape. Light pours in beyond the horizon and our focus shifts, through the two contrasting frames, towards the cloud that dominates the sky. There’s a sense of silence as we look out on to a wide, open desert; an unknowingness about what lies beyond the ripped curtain, and what is next to come. Liberation, with the cloud’s elegant shape evoking a dove flying into the distance. But most of all, there’s an absence, as if there was something of significance that once filled this void.
Portrait of Space is by Lee Miller, the American-born photographer at the forefront of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 30s. She went on to be instrumental in documenting the efforts made by women during the second world war, and photographed the atrocities of the Holocaust. This image, taken in Egypt in 1937, is from a time that saw her poised between two stages. Her life in thriving avant-garde Paris was behind her, and before her lay adventures in England, where she took pictures of the war for British Vogue. Her time in Egypt, for Miller, was a one of loneliness, when she found living with an expatriate community stifling. The image therefore could be read as an expression of isolation or yearning to escape.
