“I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside…”
Lee Miller
During the early 20th century, US born Lee Miler was a world renown high fashion model, surrealist artist, photojournalist and frontline war correspondent. In 1922, tired of the life of a celebrity New York model, she travelled to Paris where she became the apprentice, lover and muse of the prominent surrealist photographer Man Ray. During this time she was taking photographs at the Sorbonne Medical School, and witnessed a mastectomy taking place. Somehow she took possession of the severed breast and headed straight to the Paris offices of Vogue Magazine, where she photographed the breast on a dinner plate. Shortly after both she and the breast were thrown out. What became of the breast and its former owner are not known. The image of the mastectomy specimen became one of the iconic pieces in Miller’s often confronting photo legacy, along with nudes, Egyptian pyramids, concentration camps and Hitter’s abandoned apartment. #nopathologyspecimenforthiscase #letsmakelemonade
