Gisela Torres
Chateau International
Coinciding with a major retrospective of Lee Miller at Tate Britain, What Lee Wore by Gisela Torres approaches the photographer’s legacy through an unexpected lens, her clothing archive. Rather than presenting garments as historical artefacts, Torres photographs them as charged objects that carry traces of the life that once inhabited them.
The project began at Farleys House and Gallery, the former home of Miller and Roland Penrose. While leading a Surrealist photography workshop on site, Torres encountered Miller’s clothing archive stored temporarily in an outbuilding. The discovery prompted a sustained photographic engagement with the garments, which she later documented using both Polaroid and digital cameras.
The resulting images move between close observation and wider compositions. Fabric, seams and folds become abstracted forms, while garment bags and rails appear as ghostly presences. Through this approach, the wardrobe becomes less a catalogue of outfits and more a fragmented memoir, suggesting how clothing can preserve the atmosphere of a life long after the body has gone.
An accompanying essay by Rosalind Jana situates Miller’s wardrobe within the broader arc of her life, from her modelling years in Paris to her wartime reporting in Europe and later life in Sussex. Rather than reconstructing a linear biography, Torres’s photographs invite a quieter form of reflection, treating the archive as a site where memory, absence and material history intersect.
