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

Bibliographic Data

ID12914650
AuthorsLynn Hilditch (Liverpool Hope University, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume11
Issue3
Pages209-222
Publication date2018-07-03
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of War and Culture Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1752-6272 • E-ISSN: 1752-6280
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17526272.2018.1490076
OpenAlexW2856284128
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

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 The war photograph, therefore, took on the crucial role not only of historical document, but also as a means to inform, provoke, shock and remind.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

Archaeology · Art · Art history · First world war · Humanities · Literature · Miller · Political science · Spanish Civil War · The Holocaust · Visual arts · World War II · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

  • History in the taking

    Anna Wasse•Photographies•2026

  • Remembering to forget

    Barbie Zelizer•Remembering to forget•1998

  • Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning

    Open Access•Jay Winter•Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning•1998

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    Open Access•John Tagg•Burden of Representation•1988

  • Photography

    Susan Sontag, Melissa Milar et al.•Communication Booknotes•1978

  • Visual Testimony

    Open Access•Sharon Sliwinski•Journal of Visual Culture•2010

  • The Generation of Postmemory

    Marianne Hirsch•The Generation of Postmemory•2012

  • Secular Icons

    Brink Brink•History and Memory•2000

  • The World Wars through the Female Gaze

    Open Access•Victoria Rosner, Jean Gallagher•South Central Review•2001

  • A different war landscape

    Open Access•Lorraine Sims•Modernist Cultures•2009

  • Glamour goes to war

    Kate Mcloughlin•Journal of War and Culture Studies•2011

  • The Yogi and the Commissar

    G Fedotov, Arthur Koestler•The Russian Review•1945

Citations per year1
Citation span2026 - 2026 (1)
Highly citedNo

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