Beholding the Feminine Sublime: Lee Miller’s War Photography

Abstract

Lee Miller (1907–77) is well known for her photographs of World War II. This article attempts to explore Miller’s special way of perceiving the trauma of war in her photographs of the London Blitz in 1940 and in her photographs of the damaged bodies of soldiers and the dead bodies of Holocaust victims from 1944 to 1945. This article reconciles the apparently contradictory perspectives on Miller’s war photographs: some scholars take them as evoking the spectator’s empathic concern, while others regard them as highlighting the spectator’s alienation. My discourse, based on visual analyses, will appropriate the feminist theories of the feminine sublime established by Barbara Claire Freeman and other contemporary feminist scholars, as well as the theory of the matrixial gaze proposed by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. My argument is that the blurred distinctions between the spectator and the ruins and victims of war in Miller’s photographs create a distance-in-proximity, in which the spectator experiences the irreducible alterity of the war trauma through an oscillation between merging and detachment. Miller’s works embody a new aesthetics and ethics of the feminine sublime, which counters the English philosopher Edmund Burke’s hegemonic conceptualization. Burke asserts that when approaching the sublime the spectator remains at a protective distance from the awful source in order to control it. In contrast, Miller’s war photographs could evoke the spectator to open him or herself to and show respect for the alterity of the war trauma without an intention to domesticate it.