Lee Miller (1907-1977) is one of 20th-century photography's most intriguing figures. She went from Vogue model to Man Ray's collaborator and muse in Paris, before reinventing herself again as one of the few female photojournalists accredited to cover the front lines of the Second World War. And there's a story about her and her Rolleiflex that tells as much about her as her images do.
According to her son, Antony Penrose, cofounder of the Lee Miller Archives, she could take the camera apart down to the last nut and bolt and reassemble it in the dark, in some ruined billet, while working as a war correspondent for Vogue. It wasn't a party trick. It was simply what you did if your camera stopped working somewhere between Normandy and Dachau and there was nobody else around to fix it.
