When the War Was in Vogue: Lee Miller s War Reports

Zox-Weaver, Annalisa

doi:10.1080/00497870310062

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…How far British Vogue and its editorial team were complicit in such obfuscation is open to debate. 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).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As discussed, the head shaving ceremony and ritual humiliation of the main female protagonists are absent in Miller’s published photograph, unlike the voyeuristic turn of the Daily Mail , the Daily Herald and the Illustrated London News . Instead, such a viewpoint is replaced by what Zox-Weaver terms Miller’s ‘complex empathic relation’ with her subjects (Zox-Weaver, 2003: 133). Miller chooses not to objectify the women as sex objects.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Gorrara

2018

French Cultural Studies

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This article will examine representations of the Liberation of France in the war reports of Lee Miller, an accredited photographer and correspondent for American and British Vogue during the Second World War. Miller’s frontline reports framed Liberation France in idealised images of feminine beauty and elegance, making use of fashion as a primary conduit for understanding the war and occupation for readers on the home front. As this article will argue, examining Miller’s choices and perspective as a female photographer sheds new light on the intersection of fashion, war photography and the female body. In Miller’s work, fashion becomes a site for imagining liberation in ways that foreground the gendering of war experience and the legacies of conflict for women. By charting Miller’s representations of French women at the Liberation, and above all the chastised figure of the femme tondue, this article will analyse how French women function as carriers of multiple messages about war, liberation and reconstruction in Miller’s work. Unlike the sensationalist images of the femmes tondues published in the British picture press and newspapers in the summer of 1944, Miller’s war reports in Vogue construct an empathic relationship with such underprivileged female subjects. Miller’s work opens a space, therefore, for speculation on the role of fashion in shaping how the Second World War was understood by a first generation of female memory producers and consumers.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Gorrara

2018

French Cultural Studies

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“…That the gas chambers were disguised in the camps as showers only heightens Scherman and Miller's horrific irony. 46 Can we consider the Scherman/Miller collaboration as foregrounding what Crane's "Picture of the Week" does against its will? What happens when a space of order and hygiene becomes literally infused with war's horrors?…”

Section: Lovingly Nataliementioning

confidence: 99%

Bad Manners: A 1944LifeMagazine “Picture of the Week”

Curley¹

2012

Visual Resources

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“…Even the greats of 20th century photojournalism, it transpires, were not immune from editorial direction, staging of events and insertion of opinion by their presence. The example of Miller is interesting too as it gives historical precedent to the Vogue brand’s willingness ‘to defy the protocol of standard content and to take a risk that would mean disrupting familiar constructions of smooth, pleasurable consumption’ (Zox-weaver, 2003: 159).…”

Section: John Hartley’s Provocation: Boundary Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Like Water & Oil? Fashion photography as journalistic comment

Masurier

2019

Journalism

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In its August issue 2010, Vogue Italia ran a 24-page fashion editorial by photographer Steven Meisel. Entitled ‘Water & Oil’, it was inspired by the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that began in April that year. The shoot caused an uproar in both new and old media. Across the journalistic coverage of the shoot and the attendant commentary from digital readers and bloggers was an underlying sentiment that a boundary had been crossed, that high fashion photography had no right to use environmental catastrophe as a backdrop for the promotion of fashion. Much of the online commentary echoed Angela McRobbie’s argument, that fashion media (and especially Vogue) can only conceive of political reality as ‘gestures of style … they can never take the form of social analysis’. This essay poses two questions: can fashion photography sometimes perform the usually journalistic work of cultural and political comment? And how can we understand the resistance to such a function, especially in a commercial women’s magazine like Vogue? Sitting at the intersection of cultural studies and journalism studies, it will draw on the work of John Hartley to answer these questions. Laying out the discourse surrounding the controversial photo spread, this essay explains how the images created by Meisel are ‘matter out of place’. They provoke us to re-evaluate what journalism is and who is allowed to perform it.

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When the War Was in Vogue: Lee Miller s War Reports

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Bad Manners: A 1944LifeMagazine “Picture of the Week”

Like Water & Oil? Fashion photography as journalistic comment

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