Apertures onto Egypt: Lee Miller’s Nomadic Surrealism

Abstract

A photograph taken in Egypt in 1935 shows Lee Miller holding a Rolleiflex camera.While her face immediately creates associations with her identity as a significant model in the worlds of fashion and art, she is also represented here as a professional photographer, and as an international citizen -an American woman wearing an Arabic (male) headdress and holding a German Rolleiflex.Miller moved to Cairo in 1934, after marrying the wealthy Egyptian Aziz Eloui Bey in 1931, but found life amongst the high-society there boring, as she writes in a letter from 9 November 1937 to Roland Penrose: "MY God I'm so bored here!I think that I am slowly going mad----[.…]"She repeatedly escaped via long treks into the desert from "Mount Sinaie and Petra, Transjordania and Palestine" (letter to Penrose, 31 May 1938).Portrait of Space is not conceived, in such a reading, as bearing any relation to or indeed constituting an integral part of Miller's wider intellectual and artistic projects.As this essay will demonstrate, mainly through an extended analysis of Portrait of Space, by mapping such spaces, Miller's art explores and focuses on the breakdown of monolithic structures and the emergence from this breakdown of alternative formations, opening up and revealing new, potentially nomadic spaces and demonstrating how art becomes, in Rosi Braidotti's words, a "resistance tactic" (255) geared against colonial and patriarchal ideologies.Through a close reading of Portrait of Space I will explore some of these "tactics" in Miller's work.Miller's photographs of Egypt invite readings that focus on intellectual, political and philosophical contexts, and they also demand exploration in relation to and in the context of the wider Western tradition of representing Egypt (another context which has not received due attention in writings on Miller's Egyptian photography).This tradition, in which photography was highly complicit, promoted the European colonization of Egypt.It includes Napoleon's Description de l'Egypte (1809), an encyclopedic account including almost three thousand illustrations of ancient Egyptian ruins, landscapes and artifacts; publications such as Egypt Through the Stereoscope, containing 100 stereoscopic views produced by the American Keystone View Company in 1900; and the work of photographers such as Francis Frith, Hippolyte Arnoux and Félix Bonfils.Under the auspices of gathering and recording knowledge, these representations "dissected" and performed a "colonizing autopsy" (Gregory 207) on Egyptian space in order to master it; often the "essence of Egypt" was shown as "the ruin and the archaeological site" (Osborne 24).In particular, Western photography of Egypt constructed hierarchical relations between the Egyptian Orient and the European Occident, as Gregory suggests: "photographic representations worked to naturalize the colonizing propensities of Orientalism through archaeologies of truth that rendered Egypt as a series of transparent spaces open to the Occidental gaze" (Gregory 224).The photographic practices and assumptions establishing these power relations were furthermore, as Gregory notes, "profoundly masculinist," being intricately bound to the wider patriarchal discourse which purveys the colonialization, conquering and mastery not only of spatial territories, but also of women as territories, rendering both, Egypt and women's bodies, as "transparent space[s] that could be fully 'known' by the colonial [and patriarchal], colonizing gaze" (196).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.