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Abstract
During the Second World War, the world's press faced the difficult task of recording the horrific scenes of conflict, death and destruction they had witnessed across Europe. Often these scenes were so incredible that many reporters found it impossible to articulate what they had seen into words and turned to photographers to translate the horrors into visual images. The war photograph, therefore, took on the crucial role not only of historical document, but also as a means to inform, provoke, shock and remind. This article discusses how the American Surrealist and war correspondent Lee Miller recorded horrors of the Second World War, and the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald, in particular. Through the Surrealist practice of ‘fragmentation’ she was able to use her knowledge of art to break down, or ‘fragment’, scenes of death and destruction into smaller, digestible chunks for the readers of Vogue magazine on both sides of the Atlantic. As hybrids of art and historical documentation, Miller's concentration camp photographs become ‘modern memorials’ to the victims of war and the Holocaust.
Notes on contributor
Lynn Hilditch is an independent researcher in visual culture based at Liverpool Hope University. Her research interests include the depiction of war and destruction in art and photography, representations of the Holocaust in the visual arts, and the socio-historical representation of gender in twentieth-century popular culture. She has published work on various aspects of visual culture including book articles on Lee Miller's war photography, aesthetics and war, surrealism and photography, memory and memorialization, and ‘fan culture’. Lynn is the author of Lee Miller, Photography, Surrealism and the Second World War (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).
Notes
† All images discussed in this essay are digitally accessible via the Lee Miller Archives website at http://www.leemiller.co.uk.