Lee Miller's War

Lee Miller's work for Vogue from 1941 - 1945 sets her apart as a photographer and writer of extraordinary ability. She had worked for Vogue on fashion assignments at the start of the war, photographing Dylan Thomas, Margot Fonteyn and James Mason as well as Henry Moore sketching in the air raid shelters of London. After D-Day and for the remainder of the war Miller followed the US Army across Europe, giving Vogue an extraordinary hotline to the front in France, and giving the world some of the most powerful photographs of the Second World War ever to appear. In Lee Miller's War, twelve of Miller's most important despatches are reassembled from the original manuscripts, interspersed with letters and telegrams which give a glimpse of Lee's personal reactions to the events she reported. Starting with her first report from a field hospital soon after D-Day, the despatches and 200 photographs chronicle the liberation of Paris, fighting in the Loire Valley, Luxembourg, Alsace, the Russian/ American link at Torgau and the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, ending with her now-famous picture of Hitler's Berchtesgaden house Alderhorst in flames. Her writings manage to combine immediacy with acute observation, and deep personal involvement with professional detachment, while her photographs, with their own quality of surrealist irony, show war-ravaged cities, buildings and landscapes, but above all, the heroic resilience of people. David Scherman, the renowned war photojournalist who shared many of these assignments with her, has provided a fascinating foreword.