A dead SS guard floating in the canal. Local nazi officials dead by suicide in their apartments. Emaciated corpses in a cattle car. These are the photographs I have known from Lee Miller for a long time. I have a big book of her photos in storage overseas.
Tamara and I went to Tate Britain yesterday to see an exhibition of Lee Miller’s work.
So I knew a lot of what I saw today. But do read to the end here for some of her prose reporting. Her plain speaking style and her ear for how to communicate shows a side of her I didn’t know.
This photo of Lee Miller is in the National Portrait Gallery. It was taken in 1943 by her long-time fellow photographer colleague David E. Scherman.
There are a lot of photos of Miller because before the war she was a model and then assistant, lover, and muse to Man Ray. And she was assistant to the eminent fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene.
And then she had a studio in her own right.
She was an adventurer, and when she came to London from Paris and then war broke out, she stayed.
She wanted the British to send her to the front as a photojournalist, but they would not.
But she was American, and she convinced the U.S. Army to send here as a war correspondent and photojournalist forVogue magazine for whom she worked before and during the war.
That is how she came to document the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald.
By 1945 she had photographed dead nazis, concentration camp survivors and piles of the dead, and she had soaked and lathered in Hitler’s bath in Munich and been photographed in it by Scherman.
They took it in turns. She photographed Scherman in the bath. He was Jewish, and her dirty army boots and then his dirty army boots placed by the bath signified the reversal of fate and the end of nazi Germany.
Here are two photos she took. One is an SS camp guard dead in a canal and the other is a camp guard who has been beaten by prisoners after liberation.
Can you imagine what it would be like to stand in front of the beaten uard, knowing the history of the camps as she had seen, and take his photo like she was photographing a specimen?
From what I know of her life after the war, I think the experience in the war hit her so indelibly that nothing was right after that.
That’s said, from some of the photo sessions I saw today that she was involved in before the war, maybe the war saved her from a descent into a world of fantasy and eroticism she might have found hard to exit.
As I said, her prose was clear, and here is some of her reporting and writing during the war:
Describing German citizens emerging from hiding after the Allied capture of Cologne, she wrote: “The underground network of inhabited cellars vomited out more worms, palely clean and well-nourished on the stored and stolen fats of Normandy and Belgium”.
Miller shared her struggles with her editor in October 1944: “If I could find faith in the performance of liberation I might be able to whip something into a shape which would curl a streamer and wave a flag. I, myself, prefer describing the physical damage of destroyed towns and injured people to facing the shattered morale and blasted faith of those who thought “Things are going to be like they were”!
Millerc paid close attention to individuals on both sides of the conflict, especially women and children. Aware that desperate hardship could sow the seeds of a future war, she wrote: I’m taking a lot of kid pictures, because they are the only ones for whom there is any hope… And also we might as well have a look at who we’re going to fight twenty years from now!
The exhibition at Tate Britain is on until 15 February 2026.
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