The Second World War through the lens of Lee Miller

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Julian Freeman reckons we will all ‘be hooked’ on a book that captures the war-time experiences of an extraordinary woman

Lee Miller’s War: Beyond D-Day, edited by Anthony Penrose with a Foreword by David E Scherman

Two minutes within the pages of Lee Miller’s War, and the most casual browsers should be hooked.It is essential reading for any student of documentary photography, of art history, of history, and of other strands of human endeavour. It ought to be mandatory reading for student and adult audiences: created by one of the most unusual social commentators of the mid-twentieth century, its skilfully edited combination of text and image owns a magnetism that is surely unique of its kind. Its appeal is considerable and at its new price it represents truly excellent value.

For those who have not encountered Lee Miller, her life story at times beggars belief, and has been much-examined by Antony Penrose, her son. An American fashion model, an international traveller, a true original, whose photography was learned from Man Ray himself, she married the principal exponent of English surrealism, Roland Penrose. Miller’s exposure to the business of being human could hardly have been more universal, or less constrained, and Antony Penrose conveyed this to its fullest extent in The Lives of Lee Miller (1988), a ‘broad-brush’ survey of his mother’s life and work. Nevertheless, although he has published other studies since, it is surely to Lee Miller’s War that readers must go to find its subject at her most hard-headed and abrasive.

Since its first appearance, Penrose’s edited text has been used increasingly by a range of scholars intent on discovering more about the Second World War, its truths and myths, and its impact upon its victims: those who experienced it at every level. In this pursuit, Miller’s own accounts of her activities as a front-line war photographer are often invaluable. Accredited to Vogue magazine, her reports, photo captions and letters, sometimes patched together following the attentions of army censors, are presented in a writing style that moves at full-tilt.

Almost from the moment of her arrival in Normandy, Miller’s accounts detail her zig-zag movements from rear areas to battle-front, in the process describing her creative process: the nature of many of the photographs in this book, their purpose, and how they were made (often not as straightforward as one might expect). Although it does not specifically state as much, one of the advantages of the reduction in size of many images in this new edition is that their presence in this format makes Miller’s work more accessible; they are more closely linked to the thousands of contact prints to be found in her archived work. Thought of in this way, readers may come to understand something of the relentless momentum of her visual creativity, and of the acute selectivity that she must have applied to her photography, but they will also make startling connections between the same images and Miller’s no-frills narrative style.

Following an understated, yet knowing foreword by the American photographer David E. Scherman, who accompanied Miller on many of her photographic forays, Lee Miller’s War is set out in 12 chapters, as a chronological account of her wartime activity, roughly from end-June to early July 1944. The scope is immense, beginning with the American nursing services in Normandy field hospitals, before Miller’s accidental arrival at St Malo, where she became involved in recording the bloody end of the port’s siege.

Several sections are devoted to Miller’s arrival in Paris and her pleasure in the discovery that so many of her pre-war friends – including Picasso – had somehow survived the German occupation. To this point, her texts and images spare little in their sensitivity to events and to peoples’ lives – and deaths, and this momentum is barely lost as Miller’s story is traced through the final winter of the war, and the battle for Alsace. Stark imagery is reflected in stark narrative, as Miller encounters for the first time northern Europeans who are fearful of Russian occupation: the idea that liberation is a double-edged sword – or maybe even a blunt weapon.

The book ends with a 30-page account of what Miller called her ‘Baedeker tour’ of Germany, as the Western allies moved into positions agreed with the Russians. As part of this erratic odyssey, she witnessed something of the liberations of the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, at each took what have since become signal photographs, and recorded the events, their contexts and her personal responses to them, in reports and in personal letters. Within the book, accompanied by other well-known, but now much discussed, images, are David Scherman’s photo of Miller in Hitler’s Munich apartment, at his desk, in his bath, and – almost at the close of her own text – her photo of the burning of Hitler’s house near Berchtesgarden. Today, it is possible to question their exact meaning, for there is no doubt that they made a different kind of sense in 1945. Now… what? And what of the steady alteration to Miller’s parallel narrative processes as the real war ended and her own was just beginning. So many questions. Such an arresting publication.

Though Lee Miller’s War has been in print since 1992 (Conde Nast in the UK) and has enjoyed at least two reprints through Thames & Hudson, the new edition differs from its predecessors by virtue of its size. At 24 x 18.4 cms, it is relatively small for an illustrated book so dependent upon its visual content, but its production quality generally supersedes that of its forebears: where tonal values were muddy in the most recent paperback versions, the new book is much sharper in all but its smallest images, and the high white of its pages is a strong support for images and text. The typography is the sole drawback in this edition: at an estimated 9pt, it may not always make for the easiest read.

Lee Miller’s War: Beyond D-Day,  edited by Anthony Penrose with a Foreword by David E Scherman is published by Thames & Hudson, 2014. 208pp., with 159 duotone illus, £16-95. ISBN 978 0 500291542