“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.”
Lillian Wilke, Publisher, Chateau International
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.
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.
First edition, October 2025
Essay by Rosalind Jana
260 x 190mm
Soft cover
Digitally printed pages and
digital/screenprinted cover
ISBN: 978-1-8380450-5-0
Printed by Cc’d
Bound and finished by Folium
Looking for Edmonia (a Roman ghost story) is a self-published photo essay in three chapters printed as newspaper tabloids where Torres visualise’s the mysterious, the intangible and the idea of being haunted by the 19th century American Sculptress Mary Edmonia Lewis; the first known woman of African and Native American heritage to achieve international fame and recognition in the fine arts world.
In Rome where Lewis lived and had her studio Torres re-imagines her presence. From the Bridge of Angels adorned with towering angels to Lewis’s studio on Via Canova, located in the dusty pink orange atelier of the 18th century sculptor Andrea Canova and finally to the deliriously majestic decaying splendour that is the Borghese Gardens Torres is guided by an overwhelming sense of emotion as she wanders in Lewis’s footsteps imagining what was life like in19th century Rome for a female sculptress of color.
I yearn to find you. I yearn to hear you. I yearn to ask… how did you do it?
