Miller was a fashion model in New York City in the s before going to Paris, becoming a fashion and fine-art photographer there. Miller was born on April 23, , in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her father was of German descent, and her mother was of Scottish and Irish descent. She had a younger brother named Erik, and her older brother was the aviator Johnny Miller. Theodore always favored Lee, and often used her as a model for his amateur photography.
In , aged 18, Miller moved to Paris , where she studied lighting, costume, and design at the Ladislas Medgyes ' School of Stagecraft. Miller's father introduced her and her brothers to photography at an early age. She was his model โ he took many stereoscopic photographs of his nude teenage daughter โ and showed her technical aspects of the art. Miller's look was what Vogue 's then editor-in-chief Edna Woolman Chase was looking for to represent the emerging idea of the "modern girl.
For the next two years, Miller was one of the most sought-after models in New York, photographed by leading fashion photographers, including Edward Steichen , Arnold Genthe , Nickolas Muray , and George Hoyningen-Huene. In , Miller traveled to Paris intending to apprentice with the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray.
Although, at first, he insisted that he did not take students, Miller soon became his model and collaborator announcing to him, "I'm your new student" , as well as his lover and muse. Along with Man Ray, Miller rediscovered the photographic technique of solarisation [ 18 ] [ 19 ] through an accident which has been variously described.
One of Miller's accounts involved a mouse running over her foot, causing her to switch on the light in the darkroom in mid-development of the photograph. Solarisation fits the surrealist principle of the unconscious accident being integral to art and evokes the style's appeal to the irrational or paradoxical in combining opposites of positive and negative. Mark Haworth-Booth describes solarisation as "a perfect surrealist medium in which positive and negative occur simultaneously, as if in a dream".
