Travels in the 1930s:
Egypt, England, France, Romania

In July 1934 Lee Miller married Aziz Eloui Bey, a member of a prominent Cairo family. On first moving to Cairo in 1934, Miller was still in recovery from the antipathy to photography which had afflicted her at the end of her time in New York. However, she regained her interest in the medium and photographed in Egypt from 1935-39. She saw the desert monasteries of Egypt with an eye educated in the 'moderne' forms of Le Corbusier. Her masterpiece, 'Portrait of Space' (1937), taken near Siwa in the Western Desert, has the ambiguity of a Magritte painting - it was photographed on an expedition made soon after Miller returned from a summer spent in Europe with her Surrealist friends (celebrated in her wonderfully hedonistic photographs).

Lee Miller returned to Paris in 1937, met and fell in love with the British Surrealist painter Roland Penrose, and travelled with him in England and France. The following year she photographed extensively in Romania, travelling with Penrose and the musicologist Hari Brauner.