Ways of seeing war to be art historian's topic

"Ways of Seeing War: Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White" will be presented by Beth E. Wilson of State University College at New Paltz on Monday, April 18, at Skidmore College. 

Free and open to the public, the talk will begin at 6 p.m. in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. Skidmore's Department of Art History is sponsor.

According to Wilson, World War II marked a decisive transition point in the development of modern photojournalism, and in the ways that photography functioned in the public sphere. Her talk will focus on the work of two women with distinctly different approaches to their craft - Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White - illustrating some of the key issues arising from the conflict, and the forces that shaped how photography was used to represent it.  

While the concept of 'Surrealist documentary' might at first seem rather counterintuitive, Miller's war work (done for Vogue magazine) actually stands in a long line of its development that began in the 1920s within that avant-garde movement, and marks the zenith of the Surrealist-inflected practice of this otherwise 'straight'-looking photography. Bourke-White was one of the primary figures to fix the cultural significance of the newly-minted profession of the photojournalist in the public eye, as one of Life magazine's star photographers, and took a very different approach to framing her subjects, assuming a much less mediated, more directly transparent relationship than Miller did.

Miller and Bourke-White make for an especially intriguing series of comparisons, as during the war they covered a number of the same places and events.   Following the Allied advance through Europe after D-Day, they both covered major stories such as the bomb damage in Cologne, the suicide of the family of the burgomaster of Leipzig, and Buchenwald concentration camp, among others. The difference in their photographs of the same subjects provides an object lesson in the range of photojournalistic responses possible at the time.   

Beth E. Wilson is an art historian, critic, and curator. She is a lecturer in art history at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches courses in the history of photography and film. She has organized a number of exhibitions at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, including Taking a Different Tack: Maggie Sherwood and the Floating Foundation of Photography in 2009, and The Material Image: Surface and Substance in Photography in 2005, and she curated The Camera Always Lies: Regional Triennial of the Photographic Arts at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2008.

She was the resident art critic for Chronogram magazine 1999-2008, and has published essays in a wide range of art and photography journals and exhibition catalogues, including a contribution to the volume The Art Seminar: Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins and published by Routledge in 2007.