UC Irvine

American photographer Lee Miller may have been most famous for her work as a fashion model and Surrealist muse in the 1920s and 1930s, but she was also a photographer and artist in her own right. In 1939 Miller decided to relocate to Europe in the hope of helping with the war effort and was employed by Vogue, a high-end women’s fashion magazine, as a staff photographer, where she documented the Blitz in London and pushed the boundaries of fashion photography to include war coverage in the pages of Vogue. She embedded with the U.S. Army in the unusual position of a war correspondent for a fashion magazine. While recent decades have brought increasing attention to Miller’s work, and she has been included among the Surrealist canon of photographers, much of the interpretation of her photography remains biographical. This paper explores how gender, including Miller’s own, is represented within her work and within the context of the publication. Through analysis of Miller’s writings and correspondence as well as conceptions of the modern woman versus traditional femininity, I discuss promotions and depictions of national gender constructions through cosmetics and fashion, including British, American, French, and German, along with racism and antisemitism. This thesis examines definitions of surrealism, their intersections and oppositions to the imagery and control of fascism, and the difficulty of documenting the unimaginable as frameworks for exploring Miller’s wartime work. Shocking imagery, including the holocaust, the Dachau concentration camp, SS suicides, and Miller’s photo in Hitler’s bathtub, are analyzed. I argue that Miller’s navigation of gender through her identity and photography creates unique and often contradictory convergences of fashion, the body, and war.