Uncanny Exposures: A Study of the Wartime Photojournalism of Lee Miller

Abstract

Taking the World War II photojournalism of Lee Miller as my point of departure, this article has several purposes. First, it introduces the wartime photojournalism of Lee Miller to education. I situate Miller’s use of surrealist photography within emerging curricular discourses that take as axiomatic the significance of the unconscious in education and thus the challenge of representing histories that are simultaneously present, but cannot be perceived or integrated into conventional historical narratives. Second, I provide a textual analysis of Lee Miller’s wartime oeuvre with specific attention paid to how this work alters education’s “field of vision” of trauma. While this analysis makes no claims to exhaust education’s possibilities for framing the war photography of Lee Miller, it will show how Miller’s use of surrealist rhetoric and framing devices offered her the expressive power to represent traumatic experiences that resist being integrated into larger social and cultural contexts. By thinking through Miller’s war photography, this article contributes to the scholarship in education that is dedicated to establishing a psychoanalytic history of learning and teaching that is capacious enough to address the “difficult knowledge” we too often cast beyond the pale of the curriculum and to expanding the rhetorical tactics possible for representing such difficult knowledge.

Notes

Notes

I wish to thank Peter Maas Taubman, Deborah Britzman, Kuhio Walters, and the anonymous reviewers for Curriculum Inquiry for reading earlier drafts of this article. Their incisive conceptual comments helped me to rethink a number of key issues and to strengthen the arguments presented here. For material support to reproduce the photographs from the Lee Miller Archive, I thank Dean Ken Fuld, Ted Kirkpatrick, and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. Kind permission to reproduce the photographs from the Lee Miller Archive was granted to me by the director of the archive, Antony Penrose.

1 Miller’s biographer, Carolyn Burke, notes that the details of what happened to Miller are unclear and that Miller’s father’s diary is uncharacteristically silent about his daughter’s rape and the subsequent treatments for gonorrhea that Miller’s mother, Florence, a nurse, routinely administered to her. For an extensive analysis of Miller’s childhood traumas and the ways in which they are understood to have impacted her art, see Burke (2005) as well as Davis (1997).

2 I wish to acknowledge that this photograph appears on the cover of Gallagher’s (2000) book, The World Wars Through the Female Gaze.

3 For further examples of Miller’s use of blocking devices in her portraits, see photographs collected in Penrose (1985), especially “David E. Scherman Dressed for War” and “Bad Burns Case, 44th Evac Hospital.”

4 The logical extension of education’s preoccupation with equating knowledge with what can be seen and hence measured is made evident in the emphasis on “evidence-based research” and performance-based planning. For astute analyses of such projects, see Glenn (2004) and Slavin (2002).

5 For an important analysis of Lee Miller’s wartime photography that challenges the iconic power of her work, see Zemel (2003). Zemel astutely argues that in concentration camp liberation photographs, “The transcendent force of the Sublime combines with familiar forms of Christian iconography (i.e., Christian martyrdom) to provide moral rescue of the images’ horrors and fascinations” (p. 217). For Zemel, the numbing, distancing effect of the photographs is not the most problematic issue, however, nor is the fascination that viewers experience. What is most deeply disturbing is the transformation of the Jews into Christian martyrs, remaking the Holocaust victims into something they were not.