LEE MILLER AND ALSO MALE MODELS

lee miller was a fashion model, fashion photographer, surrealist muse, war photographer/reporter. she worked sporadically over several decades, from the thirties to the sixties. i don't generally have a strong reaction to photography. i love lee miller's work though. i think my response is in part universal. as a war-time photo journalist for vogue she took photographs of post war concentration camps, including many of the piles of human corpses that were left after the furnaces ran out of gas. we have all seen these sorts of pictures and they are all shocking. lee millers work though also includes photos of various german officers, and prison/camp gaurds immediatley after the war. these are what really turned me on to her, i hadn't seen anything like them before. there are several that she took of the gaurds at buchenwald, that are incredible. after the surviving prisoners were released they attacked the gaurds and beat them, some to death. images of the german nazi officers that commited suicide, their bodies lay in their offices and homes surrounded by rubble and personal possessions. she must have had incredible luck, if thats the right term for finding dead nazis, or timing. she even found her way to one of hitler's homes, and used his bathtub. she took a nap in eva braun's bed in her villa.

i find these things hard to believe, and those are only two out of many experiences she had. she lived in egypt, paris, london, new york city, and traveled everywhere in between. she was gorgeous, and worked for vogue. she was intimate friends with man-ray and picasso, she just lived this incredible life. it makes me feel so lazy, and really i am just so lazy.

its strange that she was covering these really intense violent subjects and travelling with huge numbers of men/soldiers, while working for a superficial publication aimed at rich women. her input made vogue sort of broaden their output and content to include real news.

which leads me to how i spent atleast an hour last night looking at top male models on the huge number of blogs and websites dedicated to models and their agencies. i didn't realize that some peoples interest is models. thats what they read about when they have free time. thats the sort of info they memorize and share with friends, who is doing the new dior runway for fall and winter 09. so wierd. and i don't recommend you spend your time to do this, if ever you felt the urge. it makes you feel monstrously ugly. and then you just want to work in the industry so you can stare at beautiful people all day, and i have also gathered that modeling is one of the few careers in which they encourage you to drink chamagne on the job.