Nude Bent Forward, Paris

Lee Miller began her career as a model in New York during the 1920s, eventually posing for celebrated photographers Edward Steichen and Arnold Genthe. In 1929 she moved to Paris, where she began to develop her own artistic ideas while assisting and then collaborating with Man Ray, a key member of the Surrealist movement. Miller mastered lighting and printing techniques; she also gained a reputation for portraits, fashion photography, and experimental compositions, such as this nude study, with Surrealist themes. In this picture the nude is presented as a modernist sculpture: armless, legless, and with an upended backside that suggests a profound reorientation of the human body. Her male contemporaries—Man Ray, but also Edward Weston—created similar works, but with more overtly erotic connotations. Miller, by contrast, deployed the camera’s potential to render anatomy disquieting while avoiding the offering of sexual titillation.