Lee Miller’s War

"In a way it’s an unfinished project for me. Ben Curtis, a photographer who had worked during the [2006] Israel-Lebanon war, went through a day’s worth of photographs with me in my book. We very rarely do this, but I wanted to do it with Lee Miller as well, because she took this series of over 100 photographs on one of the most critical days in 20th century history. There’s this wonderful photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub , taken by her boyfriend at the time – a Life photographer she had teamed up with, David Scherman. They were there at the liberation of Dachau, and the series of amazing photographs that she took that day culminated with these photos from Hitler’s Munich apartment, No 16 Prinzregentenplatz. The announcement of Hitler’s suicide came on the radio just around the time she was taking her bath in Hitler’s tub. In fact, there was a pair of photographs – one taken by Lee Miller of David Scherman in the bathtub, and one taken by David Scherman of Lee Miller in the bathtub. The combination of photos from one of the most notorious concentration camps and the oddity of these scenes in Hitler’s apartment gives you a window into history that we otherwise wouldn’t have. The back-story is often more interesting than the photographs. In many ways they enhance each other. Photographs are in part about dreams – the dreams that we have about them, the ideas that we associate with them. But they’re also about connecting with reality, about being brought back into the world. They’re a window into the past, and to me this is powerfully evoked in that day or two of photographs created by Scherman and Miller. She was a great writer too."