A different war landscape: Lee Miller's war photography and the ethics of seeing

Abstract

This essay examines the war photography of Lee Miller in terms of the ways it negotiates ethical challenges integral to the visual documentation of war, and the means by which her photography achieves what Susan Sontag terms an “ethics of seeing” (On Photography). In often eschewing, or figuring in unconventional ways, the horrors of war and directing the viewer's attention to typically unprivileged scenes and moments, I argue that the moral tone and sensibility of Miller's war photography is a function of her complex engagement with ideas, and the subject matter of, the ordinary and everyday. The essay focuses on two bodies of work: Miller's photographs of London during the Blitz which were published in Britain and America in 1941 in the book Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, and some of the photographs she took on the Continent when working as a U.S. accredited war correspondent for British Vogue in 1944 and 1945.