Uncanny Exposures: A Study of the Wartime Photojournalism of Lee Miller

Abstract

Taking the World War II photojournalism of Lee Miller as my point of departure, this article has several purposes. First, it introduces the wartime photojournalism of Lee Miller to education. I situate Miller's use of surrealist photography within emerging curricular discourses that take as axiomatic the significance of the unconscious in education and thus the challenge of representing histories that are simultaneously present, but cannot be perceived or integrated into conventional historical narratives. Second, I provide a textual analysis of Lee Miller's wartime oeuvre with specific attention paid to how this work alters education's "field of vision" of trauma. While this analysis makes no claims to exhaust education's possibilities for framing the war photography of Lee Miller, it will show how Miller's use of surrealist rhetoric and framing devices offered her the expressive power to represent traumatic experiences that resist being integrated into larger social and cultural contexts. By thinking through Miller's war photography, this article contributes to the scholarship in education that is dedicated to establishing a psychoanalytic history of learning and teaching that is capacious enough to address the "difficult knowledge" we too often cast beyond the pale of the curriculum and to expanding the rhetorical tactics possible for representing such difficult knowledge.

The secret identity of a biology textbook: straight and naturally sexed

“…Photographic texts were also considered as subjects of analysis as they can also communicate gender/sex/ sexual formations. Using photographs as texts can be yet another way to expose ''difficult knowledge'' (Salvio 2009). …”

Comics and the structure of childhood feeling: Sublimation and the play of pretending in Gilbert Hernandez'sMarble Season

“…Having brought the "notably recalcitrant" (Phillips, 1998, p. 23) concept of sublimation into dialogue with the idea of a structure of feeling À a component of artistic and historical analysis "for which there is no external counterpart" (Williams, 2009, p. 44) À I am still left wondering about Salvio's (2009) seemingly unanswerable question that I posed at the beginning of this paper: How does one "relate to a past that resists representation" (p. 537)? Despite this enduring problematic, though, in reading Hugo's transformative acts of sublimatory invention, I am reminded of the challenging notion that "the past is [never] linear but all around us" (Chute, 2011, p. 292), and as Hugo strides toward himself, from a past that is still being written, I can likewise trace in the textual gap my own perpetually emergent inheritance of the child I once was.…”

Containing Pedagogical Complexity Through the Assignment of Photography: Two Case Presentations

“…Additionally, both of these assignment are invitations that stand in relation to Salvio's () inquiry as to the problem of expressing knotty thoughts: “What expressive possibilities are made available to persons who make contact with incoherent experiences, particularly when the constraints of both narrative form and jurisprudence hinder rather than elicit the telling of a traumatic experience?” (p. 528). Salvio's understanding is that photography can be one such expressive possibility, drawing from Cadava's (1992) understanding that “photography becomes a figure of knowledge … a solar language of cognition that gives the mind and the senses access to the invisible” (as cited in Salvio, , p. 526). To assign students the task of producing—“taking”—their own photographs and then narrating them in writing was therefore, in both contexts, an invitation to access some knowledge that might have previously been invisible.…”