A different war landscape: Lee Miller's war photography and the ethics of seeing

Abstract

This essay examines the war photography of Lee Miller in terms of the ways it negotiates ethical challenges integral to the visual documentation of war, and the means by which her photography achieves what Susan Sontag terms an “ethics of seeing” (On Photography). In often eschewing, or figuring in unconventional ways, the horrors of war and directing the viewer's attention to typically unprivileged scenes and moments, I argue that the moral tone and sensibility of Miller's war photography is a function of her complex engagement with ideas, and the subject matter of, the ordinary and everyday. The essay focuses on two bodies of work: Miller's photographs of London during the Blitz which were published in Britain and America in 1941 in the book Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, and some of the photographs she took on the Continent when working as a U.S. accredited war correspondent for British Vogue in 1944 and 1945.

Introduction: Modernism and the First World War

“…4 Lorraine Sim's exploration of Lee Miller's captivating photographs is the only other article to declare its allegiance to war studies in the title. 5 The same is true of other major journals: work on war and modernism has, as here, tended to be collected into valuable special issues, such as 'Wars', in the…”

Fashion and the femmes tondues: Lee Miller, Vogue and representing Liberation France

“…For Annalisa Zox-Weaver, British and American Vogue made wholesale changes to Miller’s original manuscripts from St Malo and Paris, thereby cushioning viewers from the thrust of Miller’s photographic confrontation with the damaged bodies of wartime: ‘In disrupting her correspondence with coverage of Paris fashions, Vogue essentially ask Miller to participate in looking away from war’s damage and the fragmented male body, and to offer fantasies of female beauty and fulfilment that allow everyone to return to “normal”’ (Zox-Weaver, 2003: 147). In this respect, Miller’s often unsettling reporting on fashion and the female body in Vogue can be read as a contested space, allowing France’s war experiences to be decoded in ways that refused Allied myths of military glory and heroism (Sim, 2009: 48).…”