Female Combat Photographers in World War II.
Latest hand-picked WWII news.
MI5 spied Vogue photographer Lee Miller on suspicion of spying for Russians
The British Security Service was so worried about the threat from Communist spies that its agents inspected the lives of suspected sympathisers Lee Miller and Mai Zetterling (a famous Swedish actress), analysing their friends, recording their movements and intercepting their post. Lee Miller was already a famous fashion photographer, a muse for Picasso and a lover of the surrealist painter Man Ray when MI5 began its probe into her activities, reveal the files at the National Archives in Kew. However, in spite of her communist sympathies she went on to become a famous WW2 photographer and even to be pictured in Adolf Hitler's bath.
(signonsandiego.com)
Female photographer Gerda Taro was a pioneering chronicler of the Spanish Civil War
Book review of "Out of the Shadows: a Life of Gerda Taro" by François Maspero. --- On the 25 July 1937, during one of the most furious battles in the Spanish Civil War, Gerda Taro took shot after shot with her Leica camera. For miles around the village of Brunete, lay the remains of the Republican army, in retreat from a counter-attack by Franco's forces. Corpses, twisted metal and blowups marked the failure to repel Nationalist troops from the capital's outskirts. "My best pictures yet!" she said, before heading back to her villa in Madrid. Taro never made it to Madrid. She was lethally injured when a Republican tank hit the car in which she had hitched a ride.
(newstatesman.com)
Leni Riefenstahl photos worth $5.9 million stolen from German firm
German authorities are investigating the theft of 250 photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, Adolf Hitler's official filmmaker, from the basement of a firm in Cologne. The Riefenstahl photos and 300 works by American photographer Elliott Erwitt disappeared from the offices of Photo Estate GmbH. The estimated value of all the works taken is as much as $5.9 million. Leni Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. Films she made of a Nazi party rally in Nuremberg in 1934 and the 1936 Berlin Olympics brought her fame before the Second World War II - and left her a notorious figure after the war ended.
(cbc)
Gerda Taro - A Wartime Photographer in Her Own Light
In 1936 the lovers André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle changed their names and the history of photography. Friedmann took the name Robert Capa; Pohorylle became Gerda Taro. Capa went on to become one of the world`s greatest war photographers. But Ms. Taro, seen by many as the first woman known to photograph a battle from the front lines and to die covering a war, survived in the spotlight mostly for her romance with Capa. Now, 70 years after . Taro`s death the first major exhibition of her work begins at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. Many of her sympathetic photographs of supporters of the Spanish Republic will be seen for the first time.
(nytimes)
Lee Miller - The only woman photo-reporter in WW2 combat areas
While working as the only female photo-reporter in combat areas during World War II, the model and Surrealist muse Lee Miller used her creative talents to the full. As a beauty, Surrealist muse, Man Ray's collaborator, model, sitter to Picasso, Vogue fashion photographer, WWII correspondent and centre of a circle of artists and writers, she is to be the subject of a retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum. From the siege of Saint Malo, where the German army was holding out, Miller cabled that she was given a view of fortress warfare: "I had thought that watching a battle from a hillside had gone out with the glamorous paintings of Napoleon."
(telegraph.co.uk)
Lee Miller`s War in Auckland Museum - Female Photojournalist
Lee Miller was one of the most extraordinary photographers of the twentieth century. In a career spanning more than 3 decades, she illuminated that century's darkest episodes as well as portraying many of its creative geniuses. Opening at the Tamaki Gallery at Auckland Museum Miller`s War is a moving selection of images from her time as the war correspondent. As the war progressed, she found herself following the Allied advance, covering the liberation of Paris and the march into Nazi Germany. Encountering the newly-liberated camp of Dachau, she took an iconic photograph of a recently deceased SS guard floating in the canal.
(scoop)
Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in WW II
My mother, my passion for women's history, and Lee Miller are 3 of the reasons why I wrote "Women War Correspondents in World War II." My third reason is Lee Miller, a woman war correspondent in WW2. It was a picture of Lee Miller on the cover of a book that caught my attention. She is wearing a U.S. Army uniform with her tie knotted and the brass letters, "U.S.," pinned on both sides of the collar, and garrison cap that has a patch with the words "war correspondent." The picture is on the cover of Lee Miller's War: Photographer and Correspondent With the Allies in Europe 1944-45, a collection of Miller's WWII photographs and stories.
(scholastic)
Gal Reporters: Breaking Barriers in World War II
"Get that broad the hell out of here!" That unchivalrous comment was leveled by a United States Marine Corps general at Dickey Chapelle, a woman photographer who had made her way to his front during the bloody battle of Okinawa, toward the end of World War II. It was still a man's world, in which being a woman was never more challenging than on the battlefield. But after Pearl Harbor, of the 1,600 reporters permitted to wear the armband emblazoned with a "C" that meant war correspondent, 127 were women.
(nationalgeographic)