Lee Miller, growing up nude along the Hudson River

How Lee Miller’s progressive upbringing shaped her understanding of art, the body, and freedom

Lee Miller Archives, England | Source

In late 2024, there was a movie called “Lee” about the model and photographer Lee Miller. In many regards she was a remarkable person. A stunning model for “Vogue.” A pioneering surrealistic photographer working with artistic peers like Man Ray and Picasso in France. A World War Two front-line photographer and correspondent, a very rare position for a woman, capturing the horrors of destruction and the Holocaust. A survivor of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and alcoholism from an attempt at self-medicating. A creative chef exploring international cuisine. Her life is worthy of several books and now a feature movie.

Often, what happens during childhood can have a lasting impact on one’s entire life. In the early 1900s this was particularly the case for young women who were positioned to be wives and mothers and rarely to pursue a profession. If work was to be done, it was menial. If college was attended, it was to become a teacher or a nurse. This was not the upbringing Lee experienced, albeit her mother Florence was a nurse, so there was an inkling of female progression in the family. They lived very comfortably in Poughkeepsie, New York, just north of New York City along the Hudson River.

Lee’s upbringing and a progressive family legacy

At about age seven, Lee visited family friends in New York City. While there, she was sexually assaulted and contracted syphilis. She had to undergo painful, caustic lavage treatments for years, and her doctor and family attempted to put the event in the context that sexual contact is not what love is about.

In 1915, when Lee was eight, her father, Theodore, photographed her in the nude standing in the snow and called the shot “December Morn” as a take-off of the popular 1911 painting “September Morn” by Paul Emile Chabas depicting a young nude woman standing in the shallow water of a lake.

Writers have noted that it appeared odd that Lee’s father would pose his sexually abused daughter as an innocent nymph just a year after the traumatic event. He was and had been regularly taking nude photographs of her even before the incident. This practice continued throughout Lee’s adolescence and young adulthood. There are comments that his behavior was abhorrent. However, there may be a very different and positive side to this particular behavior.

Lee was born in 1907. Theodore enjoyed taking stereopticon photographs like the two below, where, if you focus your eyes between the images so they overlap, they then form a 3D result. Typically, there were viewers with lens to assist with this, but with practice you can see these very nicely off a printed page.

Lee Miller, 1928 | Theodore Miller | Burke, C. (2005). Lee Miller: On both sides of the camera. Bloomsbury Publishing.

In these shots, Lee is twenty-one in the top photo and nineteen in the lower one. Theodore also was known to have photographed his wife Florence in the nude and described it as art. Photography was just beginning to move from just documenting scenes to becoming a form of expressive art.

Lee Miller, 1926 | Theodore Miller © Courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery and Lee Miller Archives, England, 2015

In Carolyn Burke’s book “Lee Miller: On both sides of the camera” in the British edition from 2005 there are two insightful quotes about her family.

Burke writes on page 15, “They were for his own enjoyment and nudism was, in any case, a progressive practice. Such things were taken for granted in the family.”¹

But wait! Nudism was a progressive practice taken for granted in the family. “December Morn” was taken in 1915. This was before most of what is commonly agreed were the early American nudist activities in New York City featuring Kurt Barthel and the American League for Physical Culture, circa 1929.

So what was taking place around Poughkeepsie at that time or had taken place around there historically?

Walt Whitman and the philosophy of nakedness

Walt Whitman was born in NY and grew up in Brooklyn. By in the mid-1800s he had learned lessons from the Eastern culturally based American Indians about how the body relates to nature. The importance of taking opportunities to be close to the environment. To treat everyone with equality. Joseph Brochac wrote in To Love the Earth: Some Thoughts on Walt Whitman, that his poetry was close in both spirit and style to Native American songs and therefore Whitman was a spiritual brother.

Whitman wrote in his diary on Sunday August 27, 1877 and then subsequently produced a poem from his impressions of that day:

An hour or so after breakfast I wended my way down to the recesses of the aforesaid dell, which I and certain thrushes, catbirds, etc., had all to ourselves. A light southwest wind was blowing through the treetops. It was just the place and time for my Adamic air bath and flesh brushing from head to foot. So hanging clothes on a rail nearby, keeping old broad-brim straw on head and easy shoes on feet, haven’t I had a good time the last two hours! First with the stiff elastic bristles rasping arms, breast, sides, till they turned scarlet—then partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook—taking everything very leisurely, with many rests and pauses—stepping about barefooted every few minutes now and then in some neighboring black ooze, for unctuous mudbath to my feet—a brief second and third rinsing in the crystal running waters—rubbing with the fragrant towel—slow negligent promenades on the turf up and down in the sun, varied with occasional rests, and further frictions of the bristle brush—sometimes carrying my portable chair with me from place to place, as my range is quite extensive here, nearly a hundred rods [1650 feet or nearly a third of a mile], feeling quite secure from intrusion (and that indeed I am not at all nervous about, if it accidentally happens).

As I walked slowly over the grass, the sun shone out enough to show the shadow moving with me. Somehow I seemed to get identity with each and every thing around me; in its condition Nature was naked, and I was also. It was too lazy, soothing, and joyous-equable to speculate about. Yet I might have thought somehow in this vein: Perhaps the inner, never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, etc., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only but through the whole corporeal body, which I will not have blinded or bandaged any more than the eyes. Sweet, sane, still nakedness in Nature! Ah, if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free, exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is—nor what faith or art or health really is. (Probably the whole curriculum of first-class philosophy, beauty, heroism, form, illustrated by the old Hellenic race—the highest height and deepest depth known to civilization in those departments—came from their natural and religious idea of nakedness.) Many such hours, from time to time, the last two summers—I attribute my partial rehabilitation largely to them. Some good people may think it a feeble or half-cracked way of spending one’s time and thinking. Maybe it is.

Two decades prior in 1855, Whitman had surmised the value of the human body in Children of Adam’s poem I Sing The Body Electric. In Section 6 he writes:

“The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred––”

Later in Section 8 there is:

“If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibered body, is more beautiful than
the most beautiful face.”

Whitman frequently wrote very personally and directly to his future reader; specifically, to “you” who would read his words in the coming decades and centuries, urging reflection on his sensations and that a moment of thought be taken and then to actualize similar experiences. He wanted others to be nude in nature as it is a sacred and beautiful process that is foundational to faith, art, and health.

Whitman’s influence in New York’s Hudson Valley

Whitman’s thoughts were shared with his peers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In 1856, Thoreau wrote that Whitman’s poems are “wonderfully like the Orientals.” Nathaniel Preston wrote that Whitman had read East Indian literature and that his thinking and writing were influenced by the Bhagavad Gita among other texts. Whitman likewise inspired the likes of Elbert Hubbard and the Arts and Crafts movement in the USA. Eastern ideas had been incorporated by Hubbard into his Roycroft Print Shop in Aurora, New York.

In 1904, Hubbard had 100 copies of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” printed and bound at Roycroft. Book #37 was then hand-illuminated to be dedicated “as a token of regard” to Edward Carpenter, who was promoting social nakedness in the United Kingdom and India and who had traveled to the USA to meet Whitman twice. The book was then signed by Hubbard and six other significant individuals who supported the socialist and naturalist movements. One of whom was Clarence Darrow, famous attorney from the Scopes Monkey Trial and active in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Another was Jane Addams, author and suffragette activist promoting equality.

The “Tramp Poet” and early nudist, Harry Kemp, also attended Roycroft and headed for a few years to Home, Washington. “Home” was a planned community where clothing was optional, and its founder produced a newsletter, “Clothed With the Sun,” whose title was subsequently picked up by Lee Baxandall as the original name of his Naturist Society journal.

Roycroft was influenced by Walt Whitman and was a bit of a catalyst for free-thinking and utopian concepts; it was more bohemian, with a focus on craftsman artistic endeavors. Writers like John Russell Coryell may have had some Asian influences, bringing stories of Japanese social bathing to the States in the 1880s. Kemp left Home and, in 1905, worked laying out the streets for Bernarr Macfadden’s clothing-optional Physical Culture City (PCC) in New Jersey.

Kemp’s quasi-autobiographies describe his participation with the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. He describes ample opportunity for mixed-sex nude bathing on the beaches and with friends along the Hudson River Valley in New York. He also moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, where he met others of like mind. In Greenwich Village, the Provincetown Playhouse was within blocks of the ACLU headquarters, which had been established there in 1920 by Crystal Eastman and Roger Baldwin.

During the hot summers of the early 1920s, the ACLU leadership, including Wolcott Pitkin, Dorothy Kenyon, Gertrude Besse King, Evelyn Preston, and Baldwin and his wife Madeleine, visited Massachusetts. They went to Martha’s Vineyard, where they cooperatively stayed at Barn House and enjoyed nude sunbathing and swimming, as reported in How Sex Became a Civil Liberty by Leigh Ann Wheeler in 2013.

Roger Baldwin enjoyed social nakedness as it kept people from forming “a false sense of prudery about the body.” He got to know the nudist leaders of the time, and in 1929, the ACLU assisted Maurice Parmelee in his Federal court case regarding the Customs Bureau’s confiscation of his book Nudism in Modern Life as it came in from the UK, where it had been published. This was before the late 1929 arrests of Kurt Barthel and others for nude gymnastic activities in New York City. The Parmelee case was not settled until 1940, over a decade later.

Social nudity along the Hudson River

John Russell Coryell lived along the Hudson River in Orange County. He had been writing about social nakedness and promoted educating children without clothing in the 1890s. He also was a regular author for Macfadden’s magazine “Physical Culture.” He has been called by many social nakedness pioneers the father of American nudism. He practiced nudity at home with his wife and three sons, not unlike the Millers with their three children Erik, Lee, and Johny. Family members remember Emma Goldman, who had Coryell writing for her “Mother Earth” newsletter, coming to visit and going skinny-dipping with them.

From Wikipedia: Mother Earth was an American anarchist journal that described itself as "A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature"

In 1904, Coryell wrote:

Take off every article of clothing. Don’t retain the smallest kind of garment, for if you do, you are getting but a partial air bath. Partial air baths give but partial benefits.

If the temperature is mild enough, and you don’t care to take some active exercise, sit down and read. If there is any task about the room that you would like to perform, do it. The bath will go on while you are attending to other things. Two enthusiastic friends can even play cards, checkers, chess, or some similar game, and all the while the body is benefiting greatly and grandly by the bath.

This truly expressed social nakedness in 1904. While doing non-sexual activities, one could be naked and socialize for purposes that were not based on religious practice, physical exercise, or for the purpose of cleansing the body or hygiene. This was modern social nudity or nudism, defined in 1904 and had been developed by Coryell from his experiences with social bathing in Japan. It was an activity that was a conscious decision to remove all clothing, inhibitions, and shame to foster body acceptance and self-awareness, building self-confidence. Coryell lived the practice of nudism at home with his family, and he offered the concept to his readers and associates.

In 1904, Coryell also wrote encouraging nude recreation or living in a state of nakedness as a daily practice, as well as advancing the idea of free beaches:

Those of my readers who are camping in lonely spots, or who are living on farms where it is possible to roam about without clothing, can experience a new service of delight and increased health.

Surf bathing is both a remedial agent and a tonic….A great advantage in bathing of this kind is the fact that one gets the added benefit of sun and air.

William Calhoun Walker and Common Sense

William Calhoun Walker, a founder of the first formalized nudist organization in the USA, the Common Sense Club, wrote that Coryell’s 1904 novel A Child of Love, written under the pen-name Margaret Grant in a quasi-autobiographical style, was the book all of the nude sunbathers gathering along the Hudson River in New York had read in 1905. Richard Ungewitter, considered the father of nudism, did not publish his book Nakedness until 1906, and it focused just on individual nakedness, not social nakedness.

Walker, in an article from The Nudist December 1934, felt that A Child of Love was “required” reading by all the 1905 nudists or for those considering trying social nakedness in those early years. The book’s positive body image and pro-nudity position based on Coryell’s bathing experiences in Japan decades before and recounted by his fictional character Peggy Grant motivated Walker to engage in social nudity sunbathing in 1905 in New York and Massachusetts. Walker honeymooned at Macfadden’s PCC in NJ in 1906, when clothing was optional in some areas.

By 1910, Walker and his wife were actively nude sunbathing around the Northeast. Walker had an extended circle of nudist contacts by 1915 when he lived in Boston and edited a small paper produced for other nudists. In 1919 Walker officially formed the Common Sense Club and the newsletter Common Sense was sent out to his thousand members who reportedly lived at that time in every one of the 48 states of the union, and internationally as well. Walker also produced in 1919 and 1920 a directory of members so they could locate each other. This was the first formalized American network for social nakedness practitioners. It was common sense. It also all took place more than a decade prior to the German American influences of the late 1920s.

Lee Miller, growing up nude

These events, being described as nudism, were actively taking place in and around Poughkeepsie, New York, along the Hudson River in c1905, two years before Lee was born. The Miller family was joining in with other local progressive thinkers and realizing how natural the unclothed body is.

The Rockland County Journal of 14 July 1906 reported that nude bathing would be prohibited from 5 AM until 9 PM every day – daylight hours. Rockland County is right next to Orange County in New York, where Coryell lived. So clearly, nude bathing had been taking place along the Hudson River before 1906. The Poughkeepsie Eagle-News for 27 July 1909 included an article that local boaters were being disturbed by nude bathers along the east shore of the Hudson River in Dutchess County.

Poughkeepsie Eagle-News · Tue, Jul 27, 1909, P6.

The realization that the lower Hudson River valley was a key location for progressive thinkers to sunbath and enjoy social nakedness then makes Theodore’s photographs a bit more understandable. What active nudist father would not want to take snapshots and three-dimensional renditions of his growing family? What joy there is in being nude in nature. How natural is the human form and why should everyone not be proud of their body?

Burke writes on page 25, "Theodore, it was generally agreed, was a man of the future. He espoused health habits considered eccentric by some and progressive by others, such as birth control, a diet of whole foods, and exposure to the sun’s rays through the practice of nudism - practices in which Florence joined him." He brought nudism to his family. His daughter, despite being sexually abused, grew up with a very positive body image and was very self-assured. It was obvious throughout her modeling career and in how she captured images as a photographer. She was quite comfortable in her body and being nude with others.

While severely traumatized by her rape at age 7, her family modeled behaviors that expressed that not only was sex different from love, but sex was different from a healthy nude body. Lee had poise and great body acceptance, as well as appreciated a positive attitude with others who engaged in social nudity. These home-based activities and nudist values may explain some of Lee's openness to modeling in the nude for photographer Man Ray in Paris as well as for painter Picasso and others. Such behaviors come forward in the 2024 movie during social gatherings in France in the late 1930s. Perhaps Whitman was right on point, linking nudity in nature and art. And it appears Lee Miller got the point. 🪐

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The Poet in Nature by Walt Whitman

Nature is naked, and I am also,
Sweet, sane, still nakedness in nature!
Ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity might really know you once more!
Is not nakedness then indecent?
No, not inherently; are we not all naked under our clothes?
It is the beholder’s own thought, inference, distorted construction that is indecent—
It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability.
Your stale modesties are filthy to such a man as I,
There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent.

The inner never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, etc., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating extasy of nakedness in nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is—nor what faith or art or health really is.

1. Burke, C. (2005). Lee Miller: On both sides of the camera. Bloomsbury Publishing.