Miller regretted leaving the front, and wrote in a letter to her Vogue editor “it is very bitter to me to go to Paris now that I have a taste for gun powder”.


Evacuating wounded in Normandy (Lee Miller archives, England 2014. All rights reserved)

Aerial bombardment of St Malo (Lee Miller archives, England 2014. All rights reserved)


Fred Astaire signing autographs (Lee Miller archives, England 2014. All rights reserved)

Miller regretted leaving the front, and wrote in a letter to her Vogue editor “it is very bitter to me to go to Paris now that I have a taste for gun powder”.

 Scherman described the scene that met them in the liberated city: “It was an orgy of tanks, flags, newsmen, German snipers, cheering crowds and crazy, over-elaborate Paris fashions. We expected ill-clad grey mice and found cork-shod, balloon-skirted, high-coiffed beauties… Lee immediately looked up old friends, including a delighted Picasso.”

A world away from the battlefront, in Paris Miller photographed Marlene Dietrich in a satin coat by Schiaparelli and Fred Astaire signing autographs for the “bare-bottomed girls of the cast in feathers”. Yet she never settled back into her pre-war life. In a 1945 letter to Scherman, she describes her restlessness: “for some reason I always want to be somewhere else”.

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