Pre-Order: What Lee Wore

by Gisela Torres

Description

Coinciding with a major retrospective at Tate Britain, What Lee Wore presents a hallucinatory encounter with Lee Miller’s clothing archive. These ghostly images propose the wardrobe as a memoir, and the archive as a charged, intimate space.

New York-born, London-based artist Gisela Torres was co-leading a Surrealist photography workshop at Farleys House and Gallery, the former residence of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, when she decided to explore the grounds on a break between sessions. She came upon a small outbuilding and peered through the window, only to encounter an eerie scene: a storage box covered in a mountain of tissue paper, and two rails of white garment bags, lined up as if in a queue. She’d stumbled upon the clothing archive of Lee Miller, en route to archival storage. For Torres, it was a quasi-unearthly encounter, these materials charged with a strong sense of Miller’s aura. She was eventually granted further access to the collection, which she began to photograph with both polaroid and digital cameras. The resulting images have a gauzy, hallucinatory quality, the perspective shifting between close ups, the terrain narrowed to a series of lines and textures, and wider shots in which bodily forms shift and dance.

As the writer Rosalind Jana notes in her essay accompanying the images: “Many of the clothes the photographer Lee Miller wore were well-documented: the designs by Patou and Chanel she showcased with fantastic froideur during her modelling days; the jodhpurs she adopted whilst living in Cairo with her first husband Aziz Eloui Bey, perfect for trips into the Egyptian desert; the blue evening gown she had on the night she met her second husband Roland Penrose; the prim olive green military jacket and skirt she was required to wear while reporting back from mainland Europe during the latter years of the second world war (out in the field she switched to a more practical combat uniform, but kept her red lipstick); the knuckle-duster engraved with her own signature that she turned into a necklace; the lambswool gilet useful for the day-to-day practicalities of Farleys, the farm she shared with Penrose in Lewes. It is a collection that conveys, almost too neatly, the successive stages of the photographer’s life and work. All wardrobes are a memoir of sorts, but this one can be laid out chapter by chapter, each hanger on the rail moving the story forwards.”

Rather than a catalogue of outfits, What Lee Wore explores clothing as a vessel for memory, and archival storage as a charged space of possibility. It questions what remains when the garment outlasts the body, and reimagines the clothing archive as a landscape of ghostly encounters and latent intimacy.