Lorraine Sim

A different war landscape: Lee Miller's war photography and the ethics of seeing

This essay examines the war photography of Lee Miller in terms of the ways it negotiates ethical challenges integral to the visual documentation of war, and the means by which her photography achieves what Susan Sontag terms an “ethics of seeing” (On Photography). In often eschewing, or figuring in unconventional ways, the horrors of war and directing the viewers attention to typically unprivileged scenes and moments, I argue that the moral tone and sensibility of Millers war photography is a function of her complex engagement with ideas, and the subject matter of, the ordinary and everyday. The essay focuses on two bodies of work: Millers photographs of London during the Blitz which were published in Britain and America in 1941 in the book Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, and some of the photographs she took on the Continent when working as a U.S. accredited war correspondent for British Vogue in 1944 and 1945.

Theorising The Everyday

Abstract This article reflects on the gender politics integral to theories and cultural histories of the everyday in the contemporary Humanities and (to a lesser extent) Social Sciences. Since the 1990s feminist scholars have observed the gender bias integral to many canonical twentieth-century theories of the everyday. In spite of these observations, I suggest that much everyday life theory and recent studies that map a cultural and intellectual history of the everyday continue to reflect this gender bias. I suggest that one possible reason for this is women’s historical exclusion from the realm of theoretical discourse broadly conceived, and propose that in order to trace alternative critiques and histories of the everyday feminist scholars need to look to alternative modes of cultural and discursive production—for example, literature, the essay and art—through which to trace implicit and explicit analyses of the everyday by women. The second part of the article turns to the work of the twentieth-century photographer Dorothea Lange as a case in point. While Lange’s work has never been discussed in studies of the everyday, the concept underpins her practice and her work offers some suggestive points of comparison to approaches to the everyday both in Lange’s time and in contemporary theory. Focusing on her little-known essays ‘Documentary Photography’ and ‘Photographing the Familiar’ and some of her images of rural California during the Depression years, I examine her account of the role of the ‘familiar’ and everyday to the social, aesthetic and ethical potential of documentary photography as a medium at the time.

WRITERS AND BIOGRAPHICAL CINEMA: Hysteria and the Domestic Everyday

This view of the relationship between the woman artist and madness in Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady is popular among feminist critics and finds expression in a number of recent biopics about twentieth-century women artists such as The Hours (2002) and Sylvia (2003). Such a view takes a sympathetic, if sometimes disempowering, approach to women artists as victims of culture and often constructs them as ‘our sisters and our saints’ (Showalter 1985, 4). One of the aims of this paper is to suggest that while such films seem to engage with this sympathetic view of the ‘gifted’ woman as a victim of culture, their gender politics are often complex and even contradictory. Through a discussion of three recent biographical films*Sylvia (2003), The Hours (2002) and Iris (2001)*this article explores thematic parallels in each between the woman writer, madness, domesticity and the everyday. On the one hand, these films highlight the difficulties that women writers face in patriarchal culture, and seek to celebrate their artistic achievements. I argue, however, that these aims are compromised by the fact that each film re-inscribes historical associations between female creativity and madness. As I will show, all three films attribute to the woman writer the symptoms and curative practices of nineteenth-century hysteria. While mental illness is romanticised in these texts, it also provides the basis for an implicit moral critique of female sexuality and autonomy. The second part of my discussion illustrates how madness is thematically linked to the woman writer’s desire to escape the domestic everyday, which is portrayed somewhat simplistically as being an obstacle to her creative practice. In their bid to appeal to a female audience and to sympathise with the plight of the woman artist, all three films conform to the sub-genre of the ‘woman’s film’, which consolidates historical associations between melodrama and femininity and aims to evoke emotional responses to ‘women’s issues’ such as heterosexual romance, domesticity, and motherhood. In the tradition of this sub-genre, each biopic showcases a popular female star, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman and Judi Dench, respectively, as the suffering or transgressive heroine (White 2000, 120 21). While these films seem to be sympathetic to their artist-heroines and pay tribute to their lives, I will show how each might be understood to ultimately reinforce patriarchal gender discourses.