Newsletter US - OPENEYE, le regard d'aujourd'hui sur la photographie

US NEWSLETTER NUMBER 5

Dear friends,

✨ It's live. It's bold. It's full of voices. ✨

📣 Issue #43 of OPENEYE MAGAZINE — and this one is buzzing with energy, ideas, and powerful imagery.

✍️ We kick things off with a standout édito by Philippe Litzler Editor-in-Chief, who dives straight into a question we all feel in our bones:

why does beauty still matter in photography? His take is sharp, generous, and refreshingly unapologetic — a perfect opening for an issue that celebrates images that stay with you long after you've closed the screen.

🎉We're also proud to celebrate an important milestone: Women's Goal marks its 10th anniversary this year, and we're delighted to share that Pierre Evrard, Publication Director of OPENEYE MAGAZINE, has been invited to serve as a judge for this special anniversary edition of the Women's Goal Photo Contest.A well-deserved recognition and a strong signal of the magazine's ongoing commitment to women in photography.

🌿 A New Chapter for OPENEYE
We're thrilled to announce that OPENEYE MAGAZINE is now a member of Friends of the Fondation de France based in NYC— one of Europe's leading philanthropic institutions supporting art, culture, education, and social innovation.

This affiliation marks an important step in our journey, strengthening our commitment to nurturing photographic creativity and fostering connections between artists and audiences across continents

Peggy Cormary
U.S. Editor, OPENEYE Magazine

Founded in France in 2017, OPENEYE is a curated, free bilingual (French-English) digital publication dedicated to contemporary photography .

We publish four themed issues per year — in March, June, September, and December — and each issue features 10 to 12 photographers selected through a combination of editorial curation and open submissions.

Photographers are invited to submit completed series accompanied by a project statement and short bio. Submissions are reviewed by our editorial team in France and, now, our new US editor, Peggy Cormary, who is dedicated to highlighting voices from across North America.

In 2024, OPENEYE received the Netty Award for Best Cultural Publication, a testament to our editorial excellence and commitment to creative independence. Our mission remains: to amplify meaningful photographic work.

❤️ Support OPENEYE to Grow: Donate via Friends of Fondation de France

Friends of Fondation de France (FFDF) is a U.S.-based nonprofit that helps American donors support vetted French and European organizations while receiving U.S. tax benefits. Based in NYC, FFDF connects individuals, families, and foundations to causes in the arts, health, education, and more—streamlining international giving with trust and transparency

U.S. donors can now make tax-deductible contributions to support OPENEYE's exhibitions, publications, and international projects through Friends of Fondation de France — helping us continue to champion contemporary photography and cultural exchange worldwide.
👉 Donate or Learn More

✨The Magazine That Sees Differently — Now Across the Atlantic

#43 IS HERE

🖼️ Across these pages, photographers explore identity, memory, social narratives, and personal vision through documentary series, poetic visual essays, and bold conceptual work. From quiet, introspective moments to images that confront the world head-on, this issue invites us to slow down, look closer, and engage deeply with photography as a language.

📚 Inside Issue #43

✨ This new issue brings together an exciting and diverse group of photographers working across documentary, conceptual, and poetic territories. Each series carries its own rhythm and intention, while collectively shaping an issue that feels curious, generous, and very much alive.Here are #43 photographers preview.

🇺🇸 USA News — Page 172

⭐ In the USA News section (p.172) I'm especially excited to highlight Redeat Wondemu and Nina Menconi. After introducing them in our previous newsletter, it's a pleasure to see their work featured within the magazine — thoughtful, confident, and resonant voices that continue to expand the conversation.

REDEAT WONDEMU with THE GAME WE PLAYED

NINA MENCONI WITH ALCHEMIZED INHERITANCE

🎉 Now It's Your Turn! 🎉

📬 Call for Submissions: Your Series Could Be in Issue #44!

We're now accepting submissions for Issue #44, publishing in March 2026, and you're invited to be part of it.

📅 Submission Deadline: February 12th, 2026
🗞️ Publication Date: March 12th , 2026
🌍 Theme: Open — We welcome personal, conceptual, documentary, and poetic narratives.

📥 Send your work (8-12 images), a short project statement, and artist bio to:
With gratitude and inspiration,
Peggy Cormary
EDITOR, OPENEYE US
📧 P.cormary@openeye.fr
📸 @peggycormaryphotography
🌐 www.openeyemagazine.fr

🎤 Interview Highlight — Lee Miller's Legacy

💛 I love including interviews in OPENEYE MAGAZINE — moments to pause, listen, and go a little deeper. This month, I'm especially excited to share a conversation with Tosca Ruggieri, art historian and founder of Art with Tosca.

🎓 After attending Tosca's inspiring lecture on Lee Miller, I knew it was a conversation worth extending. In this interview, Tosca reflects on Miller's photographic legacy — from her Surrealist roots to her fearless war reportage — and offers sharp, accessible insights into authorship, the female gaze, and why Miller's work still feels so relevant today.

✨ Thoughtful, generous, and deeply engaging, this exchange invites us to look at Lee Miller's photography with fresh eyes.

1. Lee Miller's life reads like an artist's manifesto—from Surrealist muse to fearless war correspondent. From your art-historian lens, what do you think truly triggered that transformation?

Tosca: Lee Miller was, above all, a fiercely independent woman who refused to let men, or convention, dictate the course of her life. From a young age, she was a rebel at heart, always striving for freedom and for something larger than herself. Moving to Paris in 1929, alone, not knowing a soul, was already a bold declaration of autonomy.

After a few years posing as a model, she came to understand the cost of objectification. That experience sharpened her awareness and propelled her to step behind the camera. Even when she continued to model for her own commercial studio in New York, she did so on her own terms, controlling both the lens and the narrative.

For Miller, photography became a means to tell stories rather than to be one. When the war broke out, she was working as a fashion photographer for Vogue, but both she and the magazine's editor, Audrey Withers, believed that Vogue could and should engage with the political reality of the time. Her wartime reportage emerged from that conviction. Miller was determined to show the truth, the raw, unfiltered reality of war and the atrocities she witnessed in France and beyond. That's what truly marked her transformation: the realization that her lens could bear witness, not just create beauty.

2. Her early experiments with Man Ray and the Surrealists echo even in her wartime work. How did that visual training shape her approach to truth, beauty, and the limits of what a photograph can hold?

Tosca: Her years with Man Ray and the Surrealists really shaped the way she saw the world. They taught her that photography didn't have to just record things—it could reveal hidden truths, inner states, the psychological side of life. And that way of seeing never left her.

You can really feel it in some of her war photographs. Take the one of a dead SS guard floating in the Dachau canal. It's horrifying, of course, but it's composed in a way that almost forces you to see the strangeness, the tension between beauty and brutality. Or her image of Irmgard Seefried singing in the ruined Vienna Opera House in 1945: amid all that rubble and destruction, she captures not just the ruin, but also this amazing sense of rebirth, of art and humanity holding on.

And then there's the now-famous photo of Lee in Hitler's bathtub in Munich, taken by David Scherman. That one really shows her Surrealist sensibility, the irony, the symbolism. It's both documentation and a kind of performance, a defiant, personal act in the heart of tyranny.

Her Surrealist training made her understand that truth is never simple or objective. Her wartime photos are layered—part reporting, part poetry—and they somehow capture the absurdity, the beauty, and the resilience of the human condition all at once.

3. Surrounded by powerful men, she carved her own authorship with striking confidence. How did she redefine the idea of the “muse” and influence how women behind the camera are perceived today?

Tosca: You know, I think Lee Miller completely redefined what it meant to be a “muse.” She may have started as one in the Surrealist circle, admired, desired, photographed or painted, but she refused to stay in that role for long. She had this incredible drive to take control of her own story, and very quickly, she stepped behind the camera and claimed authorship.

What's interesting is that she also surrounded herself with men who actually recognized her talent and let her shine by their side: people like Man Ray, Roland Penrose, and later David Scherman. They didn't try to take her credit or push her aside. They respected her creativity, and that gave her the space to evolve.

With Man Ray, for example, she wasn't just his muse, she was his equal. Some of his most famous photographic experiments, like solarization, came out of their shared discoveries.

And then during the war, she really came into her own. As a Vogue war correspondent, she often showed more courage than many men around her. It's as if she was driven by this incredible inner strength and determination to show the truth. When you look at her photographs taken in Germany after the liberation, you can feel that shift so clearly. She's no longer the muse; she's the creative force, shaping how history would be seen.

I think that's her real legacy, she broke the boundaries between being seen and being the one who sees. And that completely changed how women behind the camera are perceived today.

4. The rediscovery of her archives decades later reframed her story entirely. What does this reveal about how art history remembers—and sometimes forgets—the women who helped shape it?

Tosca: That's such an interesting point, because in general, art history has had a tendency to forget the legacy of women artists. For so long, their stories were sidelined or reduced to footnotes in the narratives of the men around them. Only recently have we started to give those stories the attention they deserve.

But in Lee Miller's case, it's a little different. She was well known in her lifetime, first as a model and artist, and later as a brilliant war correspondent. Yet after the war, she put her camera down completely. I think she was deeply affected by what she had witnessed, probably suffering from what we now recognize as PTSD and she wanted to turn the page, to move on with her life.

It was really her son, Anthony Penrose, who changed everything. He discovered, almost by accident, boxes filled with her negatives, prints, and diaries from her years as a war reporter. Through that discovery, he realized there was an entire part of his mother's life—and of 20th-century photography—that had been forgotten.

Since then, he's been tireless in bringing her legacy back into view. Thanks to his efforts, we've seen major exhibitions around the world that finally recognize Lee Miller not just as a muse or a model, but as a pioneering photographer and a crucial voice in documenting the human cost of war. And this has really culminated in the Tate Modern exhibition that opened last month in London, the largest retrospective ever dedicated to her. It feels like her story has finally come full circle.

5. If Lee Miller were photographing in our present moment, with social media and global visibility, what subjects or truths do you think she would turn her lens toward?

Tosca: Through trauma, and I think that sensitivity would guide her lens today just as much as it did in the 1940s.

But she wouldn't stop at bearing witness, she'd also be fighting for the freedom of the press. She understood how essential truth-telling is, and how fragile it can be when power tries to control the narrative.

And knowing her Surrealist eye, she'd probably still find beauty and poetry in the most unexpected places. Her photographs would challenge us to look closer, to see the humanity behind the headlines, and the resilience that survives even in devastation.

🖼️ About Tosca Ruggieri

Tosca Ruggieri is an art historian and the founder of Art with Tosca, based in Washington, D.C. She offers private guided tours of the city's leading art museums, curating engaging and insightful experiences for individuals, groups, and corporate clients. Tosca also presents online art history lectures that explore artists, movements, and fascinating stories from across centuries.

👉Explore the program of lectures [here]

👉sign up for Tosca's newsletter to be notified of future events.

Tosca Ruggieri

🔧 Tools, Awards & Opportunities You Shouldn't Miss

✦ Stay Inspired & Connected

📸 World Food Photography Awards
A global celebration of food, culture, and visual storytelling. From fine-art still life to documentary and reportage, this is the reference for photographers working with food in all its forms.
✨ A must-enter if food, craft, and narrative sit at the heart of your work.

🎯 AI-AP Creative Photo Engagement (CFE)
Organized by American Illustration / American Photography, this competition celebrates bold, imaginative, and concept-driven photography. Open to diverse styles and voices, it's a great platform to gain visibility within the creative industry.

📅 Calls open annually — perfect moments to review, refine, and submit your strongest work.

📤 Submit with Ease via Picter – Streamlined entry to global competitions, residencies, and grants.
👉 [submit.picter.com]

📚 Aperture's Photobook Club – Community critique sessions and conversations on independent publishing.
👉 [Aperture Events]

🛠 MPB – Trade in or upgrade your gear sustainably this fall.

📝 Feature Read –

👉[ APhotoEditor].