At the Palazzina di Caccia di Stupinigi an exhibition on photographer Lee Miller

From Sept. 9, 2023 to Jan. 7, 2024, the Palazzina di Caccia di Stupinigi in the Old Kitchens will host the exhibition Lee Miller. Photographer & Surrealist, curated by Vittoria Mainoldi.

One hundred photos will be on display to tell the story of one of the most talented and fascinating artists of the 20th century. Lee Miller was a model, photographer, war correspondent: aspects that will be recounted in the exhibition through her shots and the shots that portray her. The exhibition aims to retrace Lee Miller’s human and professional life by focusing on the surrealist gaze of the photographer who, trained in the late 1920s in Paris, transcends this brief temporal juncture to become a distinctive feature of her poetics.

“It is difficult to narrate a woman of such caliber: her intimacy is complex, her biography tumultuous, her work vast,” said the curator. “With this exhibition and the selection of works that comprise it, we have tried to restore what Lee Miller was but above all what her gaze was, a unicum in the history of photography of the last century.”

The one hundred shots on display come from the Lee Miller Archive; the exhibition itinerary is developed by thematic areas: starting from the studio work in Paris, where the photographer works with technical and compositional experimentation, we move on to the work related to the world of fashion and advertising carried out in the New York studio, where Miller expresses her skills as a portraitist and commercial photographer while never giving up the surrealist figure. The surrealist figure also returns in her still lifes or landscapes that enrich the body of her work when she moved to Egypt, as in the case of Portrait of Space.

Due to his central role in the culture of that period, he also photographed the most famous artists of the time. On display is a photo of Charlie Chaplin posing with a candelabra on his head, a portrait of Picasso and one of Dora Maar, as well as Miró, Magritte, Cocteau, Ernst and, unfailingly, Man Ray, whose muse, lover and first and foremost colleague she was, inventing with him the technique of solarization.

And then the war. London, now home for Lee Miller following her marriage to Roland Penrose, devastated by bombing, but where daily life still endures. And Paris, now liberated by Allied troops, which Lee follows to the front lines by becoming a correspondent for Vogue at the front, as portrayed by David E. Scherman, himself the subject of one of Miller’s most iconic shots: the man wearing the gas mask. Finally, the horror from the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, Germany, which Lee captures within hours of their liberation.

The exhibition is produced by Next Exhibition, in collaboration with Dreams Cultural Association; it is promoted by ONO Arte Contemporanea. Under the patronage of Metropolitan City of Turin.

For info: www.mostraleemiller.it

Hours: Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday and holidays from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Image: Lee Miller, Self-Portrait, New York, 1932 © Lee Miller Archives England 2023. All Rights Reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk

At the Palazzina di Caccia di Stupinigi an exhibition on photographer Lee Miller

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