\n
\n
Lynn Hilditch | Liverpool Hope University<\/p>\n
A Surreal Landscape of Devastation:
\nAn Analysis of Lee Miller\u2019s Grim Glory Photographs of the London Blitz<\/h4>\nUnreal City,
\nUnder the brown fog of a winter dawn,
\nA crowd flowed under London Bridge, so many,
\nI had not thought death had undone so many.
\n(Eliot 65)
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nLee Miller\u2019s photographs of the London Blitz, including the twenty-two published in Ernestine Carter\u2019s Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire <\/em>(1941), effectively demonstrate what Susan Sontag describes as \u201ca beauty in ruins\u201d (Sontag 67). As a former student and muse of Man Ray during the late 1920s and early 1930s and a close associate of the Surrealists in Paris, Miller was able to effectively utilize her knowledge of Surrealism (and other art forms) to create an aestheticized reportage of a broken city ravished by war. Miller\u2019s war photographs may be analyzed within the context of Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s theory of \u201cconvulsive beauty\u201d\u2014his idea that an object or scene of devastation can be represented or analyzed as something beautiful by convulsing, or transforming, it into its apparent opposite. Therefore, Miller\u2019s war photographs not only depict the chaos and destruction of Britain during the Blitz, they also reveal Surrealism\u2019s love for quirky or evocative juxtapositions while creating an artistic visual representation of a temporary surreal landscape of fallen statues and broken typewriters. As Leo Mellor writes about these dualities, \u201cThe paradox of Miller\u2019s wartime reportage was announced in the title of her book of documentary photographs, Grim Glory<\/em>; that is to say, the coexistence of darkening mortality and ideal exaltation, like a Baroque conceit\u201d (Mellor 75).<\/p>\nOn the 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared in Britain, the Ministry of Information had been established with responsibility for news and press censorship, home publicity, and overseas promotion in Allied and neutral countries. Therefore, all non-Governmental publications were subject to strict censorship (The Art of War). Grim Glory<\/em> was no exception and was primarily published as a propaganda effort aimed at the United States with the American title Bloody But Unbowed<\/em>. However, the book proved surprisingly popular, achieving five printings in Britain alone. Editor Ernestine Carter recalls in her memoirs With Tongue in Chic<\/em> (1974) that her and Miller \u201csaw eye to eye on the oddities and awesome beauty, as well as the horrors of the Blitz\u201d (56-57).<\/p>\nLike a Surrealist play on words, the British people had waited months for \u201cthe Phoney War,: \u201cBore War,\u201d \u201cFunny War\u201d or \u201cSitzkrieg,\u201d as the period from September 1939 to April 1940 became known, to the point that gas masks, black-outs, bomb shelters and evacuations had become part of their new\u2014one might say \u201csurreal\u201d\u2014way of life (Burke 200). The war, therefore, had forced London to assume a strange persona, the British people becoming the living subjects of a George Grosz-style painting. As Carolyn Burke writes:<\/p>\n
By October, Londoners were taking the increasingly surreal aspects of the Sitzkrieg in their stride. They covered windows with brown paper strips, installed \u201cAnderson\u201d shelters (named for the minister of home security) in the garden, if they had one, and, if not, prepared for the Blitz with the government-issue earplugs. Signs saying TO THE TRENCHES showed the way to dugouts in Hyde Park. By November, when the fog blanketed the city, flashlights were scarce; cigarettes gave a welcome source of light. People collided with one another; pedestrians found their way home by means of white lines on the curbs and gateposts (Burke 201).<\/p>\n
Miller\u2019s contemporary at Vogue<\/em>, Cecil Beaton, who was also working for the MoI photographing the London bomb damage for the publication History Under Fire <\/em>(1941), referred to the chaotic nature of the Blitz in his diaries as a product of the \u201claws of blast\u201d (Beaton 37) and it was the results of these \u201claws\u201d that Miller chose to capture in her Grim Glory <\/em>photographs. To a Surrealist photographer like Miller, capturing the destruction with her Rolleiflex camera was \u201cnot so much unfathomable as liberating\u201d; a unique opportunity for an artist to create something aesthetically inspiring out of the devastation (Beaton 37). As Burke adds, \u201cBy wrecking some targets and sparing others, the bombs created wonders in the midst of chaos\u2014as if Magritte or Dali had remade the landscape\u201d (Burke 205). For example, in Miller\u2019s photographs, a broken window pane takes on the persona of the Gas, Light and Coke company trademark, Mr Therm (Carter, Grim Glory, <\/em>plate 76); a bomb-ravaged building in Knightsbridge is transformed into the Venetian Bridge of Sighs (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 63); and in a London park a grounded barrage balloon becomes the giant \u201cegg\u201d of two extremely proud-looking geese (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 104). The creative potential of these scenes were endless. British Surrealist Julian Trevelyan noted in his 1957 autobiography Indigo Days<\/em> that it \u201cbecame absurd to compose Surrealist confections when high explosives could do it much better, and when German soldiers with Tommy-guns descended from the clouds on parachutes dressed as nuns. Life had caught up with Surrealism or Surrealism with life, and for a giddy moment we in England lived the irrational movement to its death\u201d (Trevelyan 80).<\/p>\nMiller had already learnt from her mentor Man Ray that \u201cevery object and every person is beautiful, and that the artist\u2019s job is to find the moment, the angle, or the surroundings that reveal that beauty,\u201d no mater how horrendous it is (Miller 315). Andr\u00e9 Breton also noted in L\u2019Amour Fou (Mad Love)<\/em> (1937) how \u201cconvulsive beauty must respond to the deepest sense of the term\u2026such beauty cannot appear except from the poignant feeling of the thing revealed, the integral certainty produced by the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary paths\u201d (Breton 8). It was with this philosophy in mind that Miller began to photograph the Blitz. For example, beneath one of Miller\u2019s Blitz photographs depicting a bombed Non-conformist chapel taken in Camden Town in 1940, Carter has described in words what Miller has captured in visual form while replicating Trevelyan\u2019s thoughts. She writes:<\/p>\nIf all that one saw was unrelieved tragedy, life would be unendurable in these beleaguered cities. Fortunately, the wanton behaviour of explosives and blast occasionally produces effects that are ironical, freakish, beautiful, and sometimes even funny, although the irony is grim and the humour threaded through with pathos (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, 33).<\/p>\nWith an element of dark humour, or humour noir<\/em>, the caption beneath the photograph reads, \u201c1 Non-conformist chapel + 1 bomb = Greek Temple\u201d (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 74). Miller\u2019s reference to classical architecture seems to indicate that war can create time shifts by bringing the past into the future. All that remains of the building are the Ionic pillars standing defiant, reminiscent of those at the ancient Temple of Athena Nike in Athens.[1]<\/a> In another photograph of the blocked doorway of that same Non-conformist chapel, Miller has used irony and wit to suggest that the human congregation who once occupied the chapel has now been metamorphosed into a \u201ccongregation of bricks\u201d (Penrose 103),[2]<\/a> thus indicating that even the House of God was not safe from the destructiveness of war. Here, Miller appears to be making an observation on the sacrilegious nature of war, while at the same time displaying an attitude that is essentially Dadaist in using images to express anger, disillusionment and the irrationality of war.<\/p>\nSeveral of Miller\u2019s Grim Glory<\/em> photographs use random or chance objects, often placed or arranged by war, which reveal her awareness of the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, the use of the objet trouv\u00e9<\/em> (found object) and humour noir<\/em>. As a result, these photographs combine an everyday aesthetic with a natural ability to search out the extraordinary in ordinary life. Indecent Exposure<\/em> (1940), for example, focuses on two naked male mannequins wearing top hats and left standing at the side of the road with arms aloft as though hailing a taxi, or perhaps giving a sarcastic Nazi salute (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 77). One of the mannequins, who has no male genitalia, has a sign hung around his neck that reads, \u201cLook what Adolf had done to me,\u201d suggesting that Miller is commenting on the humour of the British people who, amongst these dark times of the war, appear to have turned one small piece of the destruction into an amusing Surrealist scene. Similarly, Remington Silent<\/em> (1940) depicts a mangled typewriter which, ironically, has been made \u201csilent,\u201d by the bombings in London (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 72). Antony Penrose notes that the Remington Silent<\/em> typewriter \u201cwas prized for being the quietest typewriter, but in the photograph it is tapping out an eloquent essay about the destruction of war,\u201d (Penrose, 102) just as Miller did in her photo-essays for Vogue<\/em> magazine. Indeed, war correspondents, like Miller, used the typewriter as a weapon for attacking the enemy with words by describing and recording the war scene; and besides the typewriter, Miller had a second, arguably more powerful weapon for attacking with visual images\u2014her camera.<\/p>\nIn Piano By Broadwood<\/em> (1940), Miller has photographed another objet trouv\u00e9<\/em>\u2014a musical instrument, once a symbol of affluence and high culture, which has been reduced to a piece of debris, yet another casualty of the Blitz (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 73). The piano displays the manufacturer\u2019s plate which indicates that it was produced by John Broadwood & Sons, one of the oldest and most prestigious piano companies in the world, making instruments for some of the greatest musicians and composers such as Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Liszt, and for royalty including the future Queen Elizabeth II. Burke describes the crushed object as \u201can eloquent testimony to a time when wailing sirens and droning dive-bombers composed London\u2019s nightly music\u201d (206). This description of Miller\u2019s photograph is reminiscent of her second husband Roland Penrose\u2019s series of dark paintings including the 1940 work Black Music<\/em> that depicted the noises of war as musical instruments. Perhaps Miller, like Penrose, saw the artistic significance of a musical instrument, whether captured in a photograph or a painting, as a way of making some sense out of the madness of conflict.<\/p>\nEven more poignant perhaps is Revenge on Culture<\/em> (1940),[3]<\/a> a photograph depicting the statue of a female figure lying amongst the rubble (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 71). The figure, probably a Roman or Greek goddess, once a symbol of beauty, has been thrown from her pedestal and reduced to another chance object amongst the ruins, like the typewriter and the Broadwood piano. In this respect, the sculpture has become an object which has been transformed back into a piece of art (a photograph) via Miller\u2019s camera lens, thus symbolizing the rebirth of art, and perhaps the emancipation of women who adopted male roles during the war. It is also possible that Miller saw some similarities between herself and the statue\u2014Miller had appeared as a statue brought back to life in Jean Cocteau\u2019s 1930 film Le Sang d\u2019un Po\u00e8te<\/em>. In these three photographs\u2014Remington Silent<\/em>, Piano By Broadwood<\/em> and Revenge on Culture<\/em>\u2014Miller has not only captured the oddities of war by photographing the objet trouv\u00e9<\/em>; she has also produced a stark visual commentary on the death of culture (writing, music and art) as one of the consequences of war.<\/p>\nIn conclusion, it becomes apparent when looking at photographs depicting the dark, nightmarish landscapes of urban destruction taken during the Blitz, including Miller\u2019s Grim Glory<\/em> photographs, that there is a distinct lack of dead bodies on display. As Ian Walker explains, \u201cIn the great mass of photography of the Blitz, there are very few pictures of actual bodies, largely because of self-censorship. Rather buildings, statues, objects and mannequins become metaphors for the destruction wrought on real bodies\u201d (156). Miller\u2019s photographs of the London Blitz, therefore, demonstrate an ability to transform, or \u201cconvulse,\u201d the real<\/em>\u2014the horror and devastation, the brutality of war\u2014into the surreal<\/em>, producing sensitive and at times humorous and witty portraits of war. As Nigel Henderson put it: \u201cSurrealism was everywhere in a sense. Houses chopped by bombs while ladies were still sitting on the lavatory, the rest of the house gone but the wallpaper and fires still burning in the grate. Who can hold a candle to that kind of real life Surrealism?\u201d (Hoffman and Read 12). While it might be argued that her later war photographs, particularly the harrowing images taken in 1945 at the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau,[4]<\/a> were perhaps less informed by a Surrealist aesthetic due to Miller\u2019s humanistic need to document the scenes for future audiences, Penrose writes that even throughout Miller\u2019s earlier Grim Glory <\/em>photographs:<\/p>\n[an] anger burns deep. But there is also a wit, as Lee shouts at the devil, in her photographs of the congregation of bricks tumbling out of the door of the wrecked Non-conformist chapel; the mannequins, naked but for their top hats, trying to hail a taxi in an empty street; and the two ineffably proud geese posing in front of a colossal silver egg, an adopted barrage balloon (Penrose 103)..<\/p>\n
This quotation effectively sums up how Miller\u2019s photographs display an element of surprise often incited by a feeling of indignation conjured up by being a willing observer to the horrific consequences of World War Two, and how she used her Surrealist eye to produce unconventional photographic representations of the dark spectacle of war.<\/p>\n
Works Cited<\/span><\/h4>\nThe Art of War. \u201cLearn about the Art: The Ministry of Information, INF series and INF 3.\u201d The National Archives. Accessed 10 March 2009. <www.nationalarchives.gov.uk\/ theartofwar\/inf3.htm>.<\/p>\n
Beaton, Cecil. The Years Between: Diaries 1939-44<\/em>. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965. Print.<\/p>\nBreton, Andr\u00e9. Mad Love<\/em> (L\u2019Amour Fou<\/em>). Trans. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Print.<\/p>\nBurke, Carolyn. Lee Miller<\/em>. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Print.<\/p>\nCarter, Ernestine, ed. Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire<\/em>. London: Lund Humphries, 1941. Print.<\/p>\n—. With Tongue in Chic<\/em>. London: Michael Joseph, 1974. Print.<\/p>\nEliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962<\/em>. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1963. Print.<\/p>\nHoffman, Dave and Shirley Read. \u201cNigel Henderson.\u201d Camerawork<\/em>, 11 (1978). Print.<\/p>\nMacKay, Marina, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.<\/p>\nMellor, Leo. \u201cWar Journalism in English.\u201d In Marina MacKay, ed. The Cambridge <\/em>Companion to the Literature of World War II<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 67-80. Print.<\/p>\nMiller, Lee. \u201cI Worked with Man Ray\u201d, Lilliput<\/em>, October 1941, vol. 9, no. 4. 315-324.<\/p>\nPenrose, Antony. The Lives of Lee Miller<\/em>. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. Print.<\/p>\nPope-Hennessy, James and Cecil Beaton. History Under<\/em> Fire<\/em>. Mayfair, London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1941. Print.<\/p>\nSontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em>. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.<\/p>\nTrevelyan, Julian. Indigo Days: Art and Memoirs of Julian Trevelyan<\/em>. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996. Print.<\/p>\nWalker, Ian. So Exotic, So Homemade, Englishness and Documentary Photography<\/em>. Manchester and New York: University of Manchester Press, 2007. Print.<\/p>\n
\n[1]<\/a> Miller and Roland Penrose had travelled to Athens during July and August 1938, a trip that included visiting the islands of Delos and Mykonos, the theatre of Epidaurus in Peloponnese, and Delphi via the Thermopylae pass to the ancient monasteries of Meteora. This trip featured in Penrose\u2019s The Road is Wider than Long (1939; Walker 76).<\/p>\n[2]<\/a> Although the photograph of the blocked doorway was taken for Grim Glory<\/em>, it was never included in the publication.<\/p>\n[3]<\/a> According to Antony Penrose, \u201cRevenge on Culture\u201d was reproduced numerous times during the war even appearing on the front cover of an Arabic newspaper \u00a0(Penrose 104).<\/p>\n[4]<\/a> Miller was an accredited war photographer with the US Armed Forces and was with the 20th Armoured Division, the 42nd Infantry Division (also known as the Rainbow Company), and the 45th Infantry Division when they liberated the Dachau \u201cdeath camp\u201d on 29 April 1945.<\/p>\n
\nThis article is licensed under a \u00a0Creative Commons 3.0 License<\/a> although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their right to fair dealing\u00a0under the\u00a0Canadian Copyright Act<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Unreal City, Lee Miller\u2019s photographs of the London Blitz, including the twenty-two published in Ernestine Carter\u2019s Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire <\/em>(1941), effectively demonstrate what Susan Sontag describes as \u201ca beauty in ruins\u201d (Sontag 67). As a former student and muse of Man Ray during the late 1920s and early 1930s and a close associate of the Surrealists in Paris, Miller was able to effectively utilize her knowledge of Surrealism (and other art forms) to create an aestheticized reportage of a broken city ravished by war. Miller\u2019s war photographs may be analyzed within the context of Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s theory of \u201cconvulsive beauty\u201d\u2014his idea that an object or scene of devastation can be represented or analyzed as something beautiful by convulsing, or transforming, it into its apparent opposite. Therefore, Miller\u2019s war photographs not only depict the chaos and destruction of Britain during the Blitz, they also reveal Surrealism\u2019s love for quirky or evocative juxtapositions while creating an artistic visual representation of a temporary surreal landscape of fallen statues and broken typewriters. As Leo Mellor writes about these dualities, \u201cThe paradox of Miller\u2019s wartime reportage was announced in the title of her book of documentary photographs, Grim Glory<\/em>; that is to say, the coexistence of darkening mortality and ideal exaltation, like a Baroque conceit\u201d (Mellor 75).<\/p>\n On the 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared in Britain, the Ministry of Information had been established with responsibility for news and press censorship, home publicity, and overseas promotion in Allied and neutral countries. Therefore, all non-Governmental publications were subject to strict censorship (The Art of War). Grim Glory<\/em> was no exception and was primarily published as a propaganda effort aimed at the United States with the American title Bloody But Unbowed<\/em>. However, the book proved surprisingly popular, achieving five printings in Britain alone. Editor Ernestine Carter recalls in her memoirs With Tongue in Chic<\/em> (1974) that her and Miller \u201csaw eye to eye on the oddities and awesome beauty, as well as the horrors of the Blitz\u201d (56-57).<\/p>\n Like a Surrealist play on words, the British people had waited months for \u201cthe Phoney War,: \u201cBore War,\u201d \u201cFunny War\u201d or \u201cSitzkrieg,\u201d as the period from September 1939 to April 1940 became known, to the point that gas masks, black-outs, bomb shelters and evacuations had become part of their new\u2014one might say \u201csurreal\u201d\u2014way of life (Burke 200). The war, therefore, had forced London to assume a strange persona, the British people becoming the living subjects of a George Grosz-style painting. As Carolyn Burke writes:<\/p>\n By October, Londoners were taking the increasingly surreal aspects of the Sitzkrieg in their stride. They covered windows with brown paper strips, installed \u201cAnderson\u201d shelters (named for the minister of home security) in the garden, if they had one, and, if not, prepared for the Blitz with the government-issue earplugs. Signs saying TO THE TRENCHES showed the way to dugouts in Hyde Park. By November, when the fog blanketed the city, flashlights were scarce; cigarettes gave a welcome source of light. People collided with one another; pedestrians found their way home by means of white lines on the curbs and gateposts (Burke 201).<\/p>\n Miller\u2019s contemporary at Vogue<\/em>, Cecil Beaton, who was also working for the MoI photographing the London bomb damage for the publication History Under Fire <\/em>(1941), referred to the chaotic nature of the Blitz in his diaries as a product of the \u201claws of blast\u201d (Beaton 37) and it was the results of these \u201claws\u201d that Miller chose to capture in her Grim Glory <\/em>photographs. To a Surrealist photographer like Miller, capturing the destruction with her Rolleiflex camera was \u201cnot so much unfathomable as liberating\u201d; a unique opportunity for an artist to create something aesthetically inspiring out of the devastation (Beaton 37). As Burke adds, \u201cBy wrecking some targets and sparing others, the bombs created wonders in the midst of chaos\u2014as if Magritte or Dali had remade the landscape\u201d (Burke 205). For example, in Miller\u2019s photographs, a broken window pane takes on the persona of the Gas, Light and Coke company trademark, Mr Therm (Carter, Grim Glory, <\/em>plate 76); a bomb-ravaged building in Knightsbridge is transformed into the Venetian Bridge of Sighs (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 63); and in a London park a grounded barrage balloon becomes the giant \u201cegg\u201d of two extremely proud-looking geese (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 104). The creative potential of these scenes were endless. British Surrealist Julian Trevelyan noted in his 1957 autobiography Indigo Days<\/em> that it \u201cbecame absurd to compose Surrealist confections when high explosives could do it much better, and when German soldiers with Tommy-guns descended from the clouds on parachutes dressed as nuns. Life had caught up with Surrealism or Surrealism with life, and for a giddy moment we in England lived the irrational movement to its death\u201d (Trevelyan 80).<\/p>\n Miller had already learnt from her mentor Man Ray that \u201cevery object and every person is beautiful, and that the artist\u2019s job is to find the moment, the angle, or the surroundings that reveal that beauty,\u201d no mater how horrendous it is (Miller 315). Andr\u00e9 Breton also noted in L\u2019Amour Fou (Mad Love)<\/em> (1937) how \u201cconvulsive beauty must respond to the deepest sense of the term\u2026such beauty cannot appear except from the poignant feeling of the thing revealed, the integral certainty produced by the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary paths\u201d (Breton 8). It was with this philosophy in mind that Miller began to photograph the Blitz. For example, beneath one of Miller\u2019s Blitz photographs depicting a bombed Non-conformist chapel taken in Camden Town in 1940, Carter has described in words what Miller has captured in visual form while replicating Trevelyan\u2019s thoughts. She writes:<\/p>\n If all that one saw was unrelieved tragedy, life would be unendurable in these beleaguered cities. Fortunately, the wanton behaviour of explosives and blast occasionally produces effects that are ironical, freakish, beautiful, and sometimes even funny, although the irony is grim and the humour threaded through with pathos (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, 33).<\/p>\n With an element of dark humour, or humour noir<\/em>, the caption beneath the photograph reads, \u201c1 Non-conformist chapel + 1 bomb = Greek Temple\u201d (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 74). Miller\u2019s reference to classical architecture seems to indicate that war can create time shifts by bringing the past into the future. All that remains of the building are the Ionic pillars standing defiant, reminiscent of those at the ancient Temple of Athena Nike in Athens.[1]<\/a> In another photograph of the blocked doorway of that same Non-conformist chapel, Miller has used irony and wit to suggest that the human congregation who once occupied the chapel has now been metamorphosed into a \u201ccongregation of bricks\u201d (Penrose 103),[2]<\/a> thus indicating that even the House of God was not safe from the destructiveness of war. Here, Miller appears to be making an observation on the sacrilegious nature of war, while at the same time displaying an attitude that is essentially Dadaist in using images to express anger, disillusionment and the irrationality of war.<\/p>\n Several of Miller\u2019s Grim Glory<\/em> photographs use random or chance objects, often placed or arranged by war, which reveal her awareness of the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, the use of the objet trouv\u00e9<\/em> (found object) and humour noir<\/em>. As a result, these photographs combine an everyday aesthetic with a natural ability to search out the extraordinary in ordinary life. Indecent Exposure<\/em> (1940), for example, focuses on two naked male mannequins wearing top hats and left standing at the side of the road with arms aloft as though hailing a taxi, or perhaps giving a sarcastic Nazi salute (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 77). One of the mannequins, who has no male genitalia, has a sign hung around his neck that reads, \u201cLook what Adolf had done to me,\u201d suggesting that Miller is commenting on the humour of the British people who, amongst these dark times of the war, appear to have turned one small piece of the destruction into an amusing Surrealist scene. Similarly, Remington Silent<\/em> (1940) depicts a mangled typewriter which, ironically, has been made \u201csilent,\u201d by the bombings in London (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 72). Antony Penrose notes that the Remington Silent<\/em> typewriter \u201cwas prized for being the quietest typewriter, but in the photograph it is tapping out an eloquent essay about the destruction of war,\u201d (Penrose, 102) just as Miller did in her photo-essays for Vogue<\/em> magazine. Indeed, war correspondents, like Miller, used the typewriter as a weapon for attacking the enemy with words by describing and recording the war scene; and besides the typewriter, Miller had a second, arguably more powerful weapon for attacking with visual images\u2014her camera.<\/p>\n In Piano By Broadwood<\/em> (1940), Miller has photographed another objet trouv\u00e9<\/em>\u2014a musical instrument, once a symbol of affluence and high culture, which has been reduced to a piece of debris, yet another casualty of the Blitz (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 73). The piano displays the manufacturer\u2019s plate which indicates that it was produced by John Broadwood & Sons, one of the oldest and most prestigious piano companies in the world, making instruments for some of the greatest musicians and composers such as Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Liszt, and for royalty including the future Queen Elizabeth II. Burke describes the crushed object as \u201can eloquent testimony to a time when wailing sirens and droning dive-bombers composed London\u2019s nightly music\u201d (206). This description of Miller\u2019s photograph is reminiscent of her second husband Roland Penrose\u2019s series of dark paintings including the 1940 work Black Music<\/em> that depicted the noises of war as musical instruments. Perhaps Miller, like Penrose, saw the artistic significance of a musical instrument, whether captured in a photograph or a painting, as a way of making some sense out of the madness of conflict.<\/p>\n Even more poignant perhaps is Revenge on Culture<\/em> (1940),[3]<\/a> a photograph depicting the statue of a female figure lying amongst the rubble (Carter, Grim Glory<\/em>, plate 71). The figure, probably a Roman or Greek goddess, once a symbol of beauty, has been thrown from her pedestal and reduced to another chance object amongst the ruins, like the typewriter and the Broadwood piano. In this respect, the sculpture has become an object which has been transformed back into a piece of art (a photograph) via Miller\u2019s camera lens, thus symbolizing the rebirth of art, and perhaps the emancipation of women who adopted male roles during the war. It is also possible that Miller saw some similarities between herself and the statue\u2014Miller had appeared as a statue brought back to life in Jean Cocteau\u2019s 1930 film Le Sang d\u2019un Po\u00e8te<\/em>. In these three photographs\u2014Remington Silent<\/em>, Piano By Broadwood<\/em> and Revenge on Culture<\/em>\u2014Miller has not only captured the oddities of war by photographing the objet trouv\u00e9<\/em>; she has also produced a stark visual commentary on the death of culture (writing, music and art) as one of the consequences of war.<\/p>\n In conclusion, it becomes apparent when looking at photographs depicting the dark, nightmarish landscapes of urban destruction taken during the Blitz, including Miller\u2019s Grim Glory<\/em> photographs, that there is a distinct lack of dead bodies on display. As Ian Walker explains, \u201cIn the great mass of photography of the Blitz, there are very few pictures of actual bodies, largely because of self-censorship. Rather buildings, statues, objects and mannequins become metaphors for the destruction wrought on real bodies\u201d (156). Miller\u2019s photographs of the London Blitz, therefore, demonstrate an ability to transform, or \u201cconvulse,\u201d the real<\/em>\u2014the horror and devastation, the brutality of war\u2014into the surreal<\/em>, producing sensitive and at times humorous and witty portraits of war. As Nigel Henderson put it: \u201cSurrealism was everywhere in a sense. Houses chopped by bombs while ladies were still sitting on the lavatory, the rest of the house gone but the wallpaper and fires still burning in the grate. Who can hold a candle to that kind of real life Surrealism?\u201d (Hoffman and Read 12). While it might be argued that her later war photographs, particularly the harrowing images taken in 1945 at the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau,[4]<\/a> were perhaps less informed by a Surrealist aesthetic due to Miller\u2019s humanistic need to document the scenes for future audiences, Penrose writes that even throughout Miller\u2019s earlier Grim Glory <\/em>photographs:<\/p>\n [an] anger burns deep. But there is also a wit, as Lee shouts at the devil, in her photographs of the congregation of bricks tumbling out of the door of the wrecked Non-conformist chapel; the mannequins, naked but for their top hats, trying to hail a taxi in an empty street; and the two ineffably proud geese posing in front of a colossal silver egg, an adopted barrage balloon (Penrose 103)..<\/p>\n This quotation effectively sums up how Miller\u2019s photographs display an element of surprise often incited by a feeling of indignation conjured up by being a willing observer to the horrific consequences of World War Two, and how she used her Surrealist eye to produce unconventional photographic representations of the dark spectacle of war.<\/p>\n The Art of War. \u201cLearn about the Art: The Ministry of Information, INF series and INF 3.\u201d The National Archives. Accessed 10 March 2009. <www.nationalarchives.gov.uk\/ theartofwar\/inf3.htm>.<\/p>\n Beaton, Cecil. The Years Between: Diaries 1939-44<\/em>. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965. Print.<\/p>\n Breton, Andr\u00e9. Mad Love<\/em> (L\u2019Amour Fou<\/em>). Trans. Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Print.<\/p>\n Burke, Carolyn. Lee Miller<\/em>. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Print.<\/p>\n Carter, Ernestine, ed. Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire<\/em>. London: Lund Humphries, 1941. Print.<\/p>\n —. With Tongue in Chic<\/em>. London: Michael Joseph, 1974. Print.<\/p>\n Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962<\/em>. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1963. Print.<\/p>\n Hoffman, Dave and Shirley Read. \u201cNigel Henderson.\u201d Camerawork<\/em>, 11 (1978). Print.<\/p>\n MacKay, Marina, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.<\/p>\n Mellor, Leo. \u201cWar Journalism in English.\u201d In Marina MacKay, ed. The Cambridge <\/em>Companion to the Literature of World War II<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 67-80. Print.<\/p>\n Miller, Lee. \u201cI Worked with Man Ray\u201d, Lilliput<\/em>, October 1941, vol. 9, no. 4. 315-324.<\/p>\n Penrose, Antony. The Lives of Lee Miller<\/em>. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. Print.<\/p>\n Pope-Hennessy, James and Cecil Beaton. History Under<\/em> Fire<\/em>. Mayfair, London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1941. Print.<\/p>\n Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em>. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.<\/p>\n Trevelyan, Julian. Indigo Days: Art and Memoirs of Julian Trevelyan<\/em>. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996. Print.<\/p>\n Walker, Ian. So Exotic, So Homemade, Englishness and Documentary Photography<\/em>. Manchester and New York: University of Manchester Press, 2007. Print.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Miller and Roland Penrose had travelled to Athens during July and August 1938, a trip that included visiting the islands of Delos and Mykonos, the theatre of Epidaurus in Peloponnese, and Delphi via the Thermopylae pass to the ancient monasteries of Meteora. This trip featured in Penrose\u2019s The Road is Wider than Long (1939; Walker 76).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Although the photograph of the blocked doorway was taken for Grim Glory<\/em>, it was never included in the publication.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> According to Antony Penrose, \u201cRevenge on Culture\u201d was reproduced numerous times during the war even appearing on the front cover of an Arabic newspaper \u00a0(Penrose 104).<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Miller was an accredited war photographer with the US Armed Forces and was with the 20th Armoured Division, the 42nd Infantry Division (also known as the Rainbow Company), and the 45th Infantry Division when they liberated the Dachau \u201cdeath camp\u201d on 29 April 1945.<\/p>\n This article is licensed under a \u00a0Creative Commons 3.0 License<\/a> although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their right to fair dealing\u00a0under the\u00a0Canadian Copyright Act<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\nUnder the brown fog of a winter dawn,
\nA crowd flowed under London Bridge, so many,
\nI had not thought death had undone so many.
\n(Eliot 65)
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWorks Cited<\/span><\/h4>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/88x31-1.png\" "\\"88x31")
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