Carolyn Burke was born in Australia. A biographer, translator and art critic, she met and interviewed Lee Miller while conducting research for her previous biography, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Her many articles and translations from the French have appeared in such magazines as Art In America, The New Yorker, PN Review, Pink, Hemispheres, and Poetry Flash. She lives in Santa Cruz, California and spends as much time as she can in Paris.
Lee Miller was one of the most extraordinary photographers of the twentieth century, famous for her portraits and devastating photographs of World War Two, as well as for her legendary beauty. An art student and a Vogue model, she was a close friend of artists such as Picasso, Cocteau, Max Ernst and Paul Eluard, and became a muse of Man Ray and the Parisian surrealists. One of the few female photographers to enter Hitler's Germany, she was the first to access his Munich home and among the first to document the liberation of the concentration camps. Carolyn Burke captures Lee Miller in all her complexity, unveiling the glittering art world of the thirties and forties of which she was a central figure. Meticulously researched, beautifully written, this is an enthralling account of one of the most fascinating women of her era.
'Lee Miller was an astounding woman, brought memorably to life in this astounding book'
'Lee Miller "the Surrealist icon turned wartime heroine behind the lens" attracts a serious, and gripping biography from Carolyn Burke'
'Lee Miller does its perplexingly complicated subject more than justice, adding welcome depths and nuances to the familiar legend'
'Burke opens up the story of Lee's life. She offers many incredible stories and passages of considerable insight'
The first full-length biography of the legendary photographer Lee Miller
