Lee Miller Archives Booth, Press Pack, courtesy of London Photo 2025 [Photo by LeeMillerArchives]<\/p>\n
Miller\u2019s images from the front lines are a singular and haunting record of the war\u2014ranging from the London Blitz to the liberation of Paris, and later the Nazi concentration camps. She captured war\u2019s devastation. Her work as a Vogue photojournalist blends raw reportage with a deeply personal visual sensibility\u2014influenced by her earlier years as a fashion model and participant in the Surrealist movement.<\/p>\n
Miller\u2019s extraordinary life developed in the tumultuous years after World War I, amid Hitler\u2019s ascension to power in Germany, the betrayal of revolutionary struggles in Spain and France, and the eruption of World War II.<\/p>\n
Miller eventually joined the US 83rd Infantry in 1944 and was one of a handful of women accredited to accompany Allied forces, giving her frontline access rare for any photojournalist.<\/p>\n
In August 1944 Miller found herself, illegally, as the only correspondent covering the siege of St Malo. She witnessed the terrible effects of newly introduced napalm bombing of one of the last remaining Nazi strongholds, which deprived the occupants of air and vaporised their bodies. Her photo Fall of the Citadel, which freezes in mid-air the huge cloud of smoke from bombers, is framed by building rooftops and a partly raised flag, emphasizing the scale of the attack. The Rolleiflex Miller used did not have a telephoto lens, so she had to get as close as it looks in the picture\u2014700 yards away. <\/p>\n At the 44th Evacuation Hospital Miller produced photographs of surgeons and nurses working over wounded soldiers in tent operating rooms. \u201cFor an hour or so I watched lives and limbs being saved, by skill, devotion and endurance. Grave faces and tired feet passed up and down the tent isles. We discussed whether doubling the staff of doctors and nurses would relieve them of work\u2014it seemed not, as everyone by his own volition would still do double his duty\u201d, she recalled.<\/p>\n In Surgeon and Anaesthetist (1944) operating lights and intravenous drips are shown as geometric forms above two masked medics looking after an injured soldier. The composition uses the diagonal lines of the tent roof and medical apparatus to lead the eye toward the patient. Miller\u2019s tonal choices\u2014the glaring surgical light against deep shadows\u2014heighten the drama and tension. <\/p>\n In 1945 Miller witnessed the fall of the Nazi regime. In a previously unseen photo soldiers are seen posing at a hotel in Berchtesgaden, Germany. She described how, \u201cThe left-hand smoke plume on the mountain behind them is Hitler\u2019s house burning; the right-hand smoke plume is a forest fire or something… At the time the SS were still about.\u201d<\/p>\n Miller was among the first to discover the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. Her photographs are graphic. One shows emaciated inmates on bunks, the frame dominated by their gaunt, hollowed faces and protruding ribs. To accompany another image of skeletal bodies outside a crematorium, Miller pleaded to Vogue, \u201cI IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE,\u201d fearing readers would doubt the reality.<\/p>\n She wrote graphically, \u201cDachau had everything you\u2019ll ever hear or close your ears to about a concentration camp. The great dusty spaces that had been trampled by so many thousands of condemned feet\u2014feet which ached and shuffled and stamped away the cold and shifted to relieve the pain and finally became useless except to walk them to the death chamber.\u201d<\/p>\n Soon after the war most of Miller\u2019s graphic images were locked away. The Lee Miller Archives\u2019 Kerry Negahban explains, \u201cThe British press didn\u2019t want to put those images in, because it was a victory, and it was felt the public had enough of seeing horrors. Whereas Lee\u2019s point was people are still living these horrors, and you should know this \u2026 everyone should know this\u201d.<\/p>\n For decades Miller\u2019s wartime work was little seen (even Miller herself was reticent to discuss it), but since the 1980s her full story has gradually been brought to light. Art historians now regard her as \u201camong the most original and ambitious photographic artists of the 20th century,\u201d helping to blur the line between art and reportage, with an aesthetic that was at once surreal, compassionate, and unflinching. <\/p>\n Miller\u2019s ability to approach war and conflict, seeking not only the spectacle of battle but the human stories within it, was in contrast to the limited offerings elsewhere at London Photo 2025.<\/p>\n The war in Ukraine was addressed by a \u201cVoices from the Frontline\u201d panel brought together by Fiona Shields (The Guardian\u2019s Head of Photography), which concluded there was a need \u201cto go beyond clich\u00e9d war images\u201d and show \u201ceveryday life under siege\u201d and \u201cthe practices of resilience\u201d amongst civilians rather than \u201cjust fronts and missiles\u201d to \u201cspur empathy and action in the international community.\u201d<\/p>\n Photographer Jesse Glazzard and creative producer Eugenia Skvarska do address the effect of the war on the military but only as it concerns LGBTQ+ Ukrainian Soldiers. Skvarska says it is important to document these stories not just as \u201ctales of queer identity,\u201d but as integral parts of Ukraine\u2019s national narrative in its fight against \u201cRussian imperialism\u201d. <\/p>\n This all ends up as propaganda for the Ukrainian state. It leaves out the growing opposition to the US\/NATO proxy war which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men and maimed countless others. The reactionary and crisis-ridden Zelensky regime fears this growing anti-war sentiment and responds with brutal state repression against its political opponents\u2014including the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk of the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists, who opposed the war based on internationalist socialist principles\u2014and the banning of the World Socialist Web Site. Tens of thousands of men of military recruitment age have fled the country.<\/p>\n On the genocide in Gaza the only images on display were Adam Rouhana\u2019s Before Freedom series, shot over several years portraying the resilience of Palestinian life with images of the occupation\u2014a boy cycles past the 8 metre high separation wall\u2014a symbol of Palestinian resistance.<\/p>\n Rouhana explains, \u201cIn the news media, Palestinians were often portrayed as masked and violent or as disposable and lifeless: a faceless, miserable people. But that\u2019s not what I see when I am there. Instead, what I photograph is unconditional communal love, a rootedness and sense of historical belonging in the land, and a daily generosity and collective spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, we Palestinians are being slaughtered and occupied, and are actively resisting that, but that\u2019s not the entirety of our existence…\u201d<\/p>\n The words of Leon Trotsky, writing in June 1938 shortly before the outbreak of World War II and his assassination on August 20, 1940 more than ever serve as a guide for artists:<\/p>\n \u201cTo find a solution to this impasse [the decay of capitalist society] through art itself is impossible. It is a crisis which concerns all culture, beginning at its economic base and ending in the highest spheres of ideology. Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably\u2014as Grecian art rotted beneath the ruins of a culture founded on slavery\u2014unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character. For these reasons the function of art in our epoch is determined by its relation to the revolution.\u201d (\u201cArt and Politics in Our Epoch<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n Join the fight against the Gaza genocide and imperialist war!<\/p>\n Fill out this form and we\u2019ll contact you soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo London marked its 10th anniversary on May 15\u201318 2025 by \u201cgathering the world\u2019s leading galleries and artists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":132539,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,77,58389,2249,16,15,771],"class_list":{"0":"post-132538","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-lee-miller","13":"tag-photography","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114572679543471651","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Female war correspondents (Lee Miller second from right) U.S. Army Center of Military History [Photo by U.S. Army Official Photograph \/ CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>]
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Fall of the Citadel, Aerial bombardment St Malo France 1944 [Photo by LeeMillerArchives]<\/p>\n
Surgeon and anaesthetist at 44th Evacuation Hospital Normandy, France, 1944 [Photo by LeeMillerArchives]<\/p>\n
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From the series Before Freedom (2022 ongoing) [Photo by courtesy of the studio of Adam Rouhana]<\/p>\n