BELIEVE IT! Lee Miller's Second World War Photographs as Modern Memorials

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 The war photograph, therefore, took on the crucial role not only of historical document, but also as a means to inform, provoke, shock and remind.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.