The New Yorker:

From 2024: How a picture of a photojournalist bathing became a visual metaphor for the end of the war.

By Chris Wiley

On April 30, 1945, the photojournalist Lee Miller took a bath in Hitler’s tub. A correspondent for British Vogue, Miller had posted up in the Führer’s abandoned apartment in Munich along with a group of G.I.s from the 179th Regiment. That morning, she had been among the first to enter the newly liberated Dachau. At Hitler’s residence, before climbing into the tub, she set up her camera; her lover at the time, the Life photographer David Scherman, took a shot as she bathed. In time, the picture would become famous as a kind of apt visual metaphor for the end of the war. The same day, across Germany in a Berlin bunker, Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, took their own lives. In a letter to her Vogue editor, Miller described Dachau’s “great dusty spaces that had been trampled by so many thousands of condemned feet—feet which ached and shuffled and stamped away the cold and shifted to relieve the pain and finally became useless except to walk them to the death chamber.” In Scherman’s photograph, some of that same dust has tracked from Miller’s boots onto Hitler’s white bathmat.

Miller had been photographed many times before, and not just by Scherman. When she was growing up, in Poughkeepsie, New York, her father, an amateur photographer, made a series of frankly sensual portraits of Miller in the nude, a fact that her biographer, Carolyn Burke, deemed “disturbing” but in keeping with his eccentric bohemianism. Later, the story goes, Miller was crossing the street in New York City one day when she almost got hit by a car. The man who helped her up was the publisher Condé Nast. As in a fairy tale, her likeness was soon on the cover of Vogue. She was photographed by Edward Steichen, among many others. There was no word for it then, but she might have been called a supermodel. Eventually, having grown bored of being in front of the camera, she made an impulsive move to Paris with the aim of apprenticing with Man Ray, and she became his muse, his student, and his collaborator.

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