Lee Miller: Tate Britain – moving without being sentimental

The current show on Lee Miller at Tate Britain feels like a kind of beautiful penance for the rather sloppy “1980s” venture earlier this year. The two exhibitions could not be more different.

Whereas the Lee Miller show celebrates the ambiguities and multiple interests of a truly first-rate artist of the twentieth century, 1980s Britain tried to take a cultural-materialist look (possibly inspired by the worst excesses of a plate-glass humanities degree) and left some pretty big omissions from the artistic history of the period (no music!), while playing a rather crass political game which most younger visitors would neither recognise nor understand — I am, of course, circling around and about the image of Thatcher with a bullet hole and crosshairs towards its end— the crescendo, the culmination of lazy history and poor curatorship.

Lee Miller, however, reminds the ticket-holder that even in an age of ubiquitous photography, the number of excellent examples of the genre has probably remained constant — if one were to be optimistic. Though I am lacking in data, my feeling is that “good photography,” or “artistic photography”, has probably declined since Miller’s heyday.

Some of the greatest photographs here are great because of their constraints. When Miller broke her preference for never shooting suffering, in order to capture the victims of concentration camps, she found herself at the centre of history without a zoom lens! As such she was forced to confront trauma at incredibly intimate distances – just imagining the photographer’s physical distance from the starving, the dispossed, liberated only hours early is a chilling idea. (Discussing style when talking about the Holocaust might feel insensitive, but we are dealing with the methodology of communication- how we communicate truth to a mass audience — and Miller’s genius was part of that necessary rendering of confrontation.)

Although her self-portrait in Hitler’s bathtub is truly horrifying (a portrait of the monstrous made mundane — dirty boots on the floor, a rather poky mid-century bathroom not unlike one’s own), the pictures that most unsettled me were those taken of the children of rich industrialists. These are shown in the next room — smiling, laughing — while, offstage, some of their parents probably were facing war crimes charges or fleeing Germany: they were the profiteers of slave labour, the collaborators and beneficiaries of evil. The ironic contrast of a little boy in a cap celebrating a warship that the allies sank towards the end of the war places wickedness and innocence in ironic juxtaposition. These pictures are moving without being sentimental.

A spectacular retrospective. A must-see. Buy the book. Follow-up all the references.