Serving the Gaze: Lee Miller’s Striking Mastectomy Photographs

Honey, dinner is served! A set table, pristine white plate laying atop a striped, cloth napkin, knife and fork on either side and an uncanny, alien lump of dark, fleshy substance in the middle. The texture reminiscent of a chocolate mousse, perhaps, enveloped in some sort of pastry, oozing out the sides. Rich and gooey, it draws you in, making you wonder what sort of foreign delicacy is on the plate before you. Its true identity, however, is much less appetising (in this form at least). What has been served to the viewer is in fact a breast. Lee Miller, the photographer, had just rushed it across the city from the Sorbonne Medical School, straight to the studio in Vogue’s Paris headquarters to create this somewhat disturbing image. At the time Miller was working a side job consisting of making photographic documentation of operations in the school. One day, after watching a radical mastectomy she asked if she could take the breast with her and was granted her daring request. It is said that she only had time to take two photographs, before the studio manager at that time, George Hoyningen Huene, realised what she was doing and made her leave. The resulting images are quite perfect. They are simple, unpretentious, to the point, raw and intelligent. Lee Miller perfectly subverts the male gaze that had been following her around since she was a little girl, basically saying – You want to put me on display and consume my body? Then here you are, bon appetit.

Throughout her life, she was subjected to objectification time and time again, by people ranging from the biggest names in the art industry – most famously by Man Ray – to her own father. Theodore Miller, the father, dabbled in photography himself, as a hobby. Especially interested in stereoscopic photography, he often got his children to pose for him, mainly Lee. The earliest image of his naked daughter is one portraying a seven-year-old, then Elizabeth Miller, standing out in the cold in front of their house. Later Theodore would go on to take many nudes of his teenage daughter, her young, naked body posed for his prying camera. He was also known to take photographs of Lee’s undressed friends, sometimes in group portraits. This photographer-muse dynamic carried on even after she was married.

In her early life she worked as a model and often posed for fashion shoots, taken by the likes of Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, and Nickolas Muray. Later in life, she worked with Man Ray, a partnership which also developed into a relationship. During that time he took a lot of nudes of her, which is quite natural, however, what is disturbing is that he would often crop out her face, or cover it up. Reducing her to a body, whose role was to please the eye and be an object of beauty. He even included her naked torso in a series of commercial photographs they created together, advertising electrical appliances. Using her nudity to sell a product, again beheaded, he further objectified her. First depriving her of an identity, reduces her to a sexual form, and then uses her body to attract attention to make a profit. 

Her growing frustration with being seen as an object and not a person culminated in the creation of the two striking mastectomy images. Despite the knife, fork and plate in the frame, what she actually created was not a meal but a mirror. In it, reflecting the way in which society carves up women piece by piece, serving them to be scrutinised, fetishised, desired, and devoured, foregoing the person inside. Although there are many representations of breasts in art, this one is starkly different from the majority. Here the breast is not feminine, sexual or fertile. It is cold and clinical. By presenting it in such a grotesque and confrontational manner, Miller denied the viewer any opportunity for erotic pleasure. Traditionally in the portrayal of the male gaze the breast’s primary role is to be looked at and enjoyed, but the aesthetic of these images with the unsettling undertone, subverts them from a site of sexual desire into a striking illustration of the objectification women experience under the patriarchal structure. They serve as a reminder of how the male gaze dismembers, first the body, then the human inside it, leaving no longer a woman, but an object stripped of life, identity and subject-hood. 

The images are still very current and speak the truth today just as they did back then. They are possibly even more urgent now, when placed against the context of increasing violence against women which so often leaves them too, no more than lifeless objects.

Image source: https://www.fmirobcn.org/blog/en/2018/11/29/future-was-female/