MILLER, Lee. Guerlain Parfumerie shopfront, 68 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Paris, France c.1930. Chiddingly: Lee Miller Archives. 2003.
Ten Gelatin silver prints, framed, after the original photographs, printed later by Carole Callow, titled and editioned 2/30 in pencil with copyright and Lee Miller archive stamp signed by Antony Penrose in pencil verso, 60 x 60 mm (each). 130 x 700 mm (size including frame).
Limited contact sheet edition of Miller’s Exploding Hand.
A striking set of prints capturing the windows of the Guerlain parfumerie on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, just steps from the Vogue Paris studios where photographer Lee Miller worked in the early 1930s. The photographs belong to one of the most creatively fertile periods of Miller’s career, when she lived and worked at the centre of the Parisian avant-garde. During this time, Miller turned her lens from fashion and portraiture outward onto the streets of Paris, rendering everyday urban scenes with a disarming, surreal intensity.
The present collection features two particularly significant Parisian works, both demonstrating Miller’s fascination with windows as sites of visual ambiguity and unexpected beauty. In Untitled [Exploding Hand], a woman’s outstretched hand appears to explode in a puff of smoke, an effect produced by the fine scratches left on the glass entrance door by generations of Guerlain customers’ rings. In Reflection of Lee Miller, the photographer herself appears as a passing reflection in the parfumerie shopfront window, suspended alongside bottles of scent in an oblique self-portrait characteristic of her early Surrealist style.
Provenance: This contact sheet edition was produced for the patrons of the Photographer’s Gallery in 2003, hand-printed at the Lee Miller Archives by Carole Callow, Estate Fine Printer for the Archives for over 36 years. Each print is signed by Antony Penrose, son of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose and director of the Archive.
SKU: 2122622