This is a striking photograph, isn’t it.
I have known Lee Miller’s photos for years, and I know this photo very well because it is so striking. You feel there is a story there.
Until I saw the photo in the Lee Miller exhibition at the Tate I thought Miller had photographed two women doing their bit for the war effort spotting German planes approaching the coast.
But it was only on reading the text accompanying the photo in the Lee Miller exhibition that I understood how it was taken.
It was really a fashion shoot.
The photo, entitled Fire masks, was shot in 1941 outside the air raid shelter in Miller’s Hampstead garden. The scene is staged for Vogue and the two women are wearing rubber and tin masks used by air-raid wardens to protect against fire bombs.
I can see that one woman is holding a whistle that was issued to Air Raid Wardens to warn people about an impending raid, telling them to get to the shelters.
Anderson shelters were made of corrugated iron half sunk below ground to take the force of a blast. This one may have been covered over with earth to give it more protection.
Whether this is a standard shelter or not, when World War II started 1939 there were around one and a half million Anderson shelters in people’s gardens. and another two million were put in people’s gardens over the course of the war.
Was the threat of German bombing raids real?
The answer is in the numbers. More than 40,000 people were killed in bombing raids in 1940-41 alone, during what is known as the Battle of Britain.
Add to that the deaths from flying bombs – V1s and then the later V2 rockets and the number was over 50,000.
One in eight houses were made uninhabitable by bombs from German bombing raids in WWII.
The main targets of German raids were London and Liverpool and that’s where the majority of casualties were.
Elizabeth Miller Eloui
Miller’s War Correspondent’s pass recites her name as Elizabeth Miller Eloui. The name Eloui is from her husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian businessman previously married to Nimet, who was a model for Man Ray just as Miller was at one time.
Eloui Bey left Nimet for Lee Miller and the two married in 1934 and moved to Cairo.
She got bored and went to Paris, and in 1937 she met the surrealist painter Roland Penrose.
Then in June 1939, Miller left Eloui Bey and moved in with Penrose in London, and in 1947 Miller and Eloui Bey divorced.
But throughout the war she was Elizabeth Miller Eloui but her byline and photos were under the name Lee Miller.
Vogue
Vogue, the fashion magazine, is the ‘Arm or Service’ named on her war correspondent pass. How funny – a fashion and design label named as the authorisation for a war correspondent.
Before she left for mainland Europe, Miller worked at Vogue’s offices, which were bombed and firebombed. This photo was taken by David Scherman, with whom she travelled across Europe as correspondents. She photographed him in Hitler’s bath and he photographed her in the bath. A little f**k you to Hitler.
Click for the first part of The Photographer Lee Miller.
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