DMJ – Something in the Air: On the Atmosphere of a Lee Miller Photograph
Frontispieces are to do with storytelling and we find a curious example of this at the start of Humphrey Jennings’ posthumously published book Pandaemonium 1660–1886: the Coming of the Machine Age as Seen by Contemporary Observers. It is a photograph by Lee Miller of Jennings himself, a filmmaker, writer and painter whom she knew through surrealist circles. Taken as part of a 1944 photographic assignment, the image shows Jennings sitting in a shadowy interior, contemplating an enigmatic and luminous cloud suspended in the air in front of him. If this photograph is telling us a story, what kind of story is it? An answer might be that it is one to do with latency, and that the photograph gives us an image of awaiting the appearance of an image. Uncertain whether something within the cloud is coming into resolution, it is offered up to our scrutiny by the photograph—we are placed alongside Jennings and perhaps even led to see him as a delegate within the image of ourselves as viewers, which would make it a little bit more and a little bit less than a ‘portrait’, as it is usually described.
At the same time, this uncertainty about what we are looking at is accompanied by a great connotative profusion of things that we might be seeing, which the photograph puts in motion and which, it seems to me, is fundamental to what it does. What follows, then, is an attempt to articulate these through a kind of storytelling with the image. The article proposes and explores three entangled interpretative approaches to the photograph, drawn from what it describes as ‘a cultural iconography of airy things’. These concern, in turn: spirit photography; the history thought clouds; and the material convulsions produced by the devastating war that formed the immediate historical context of Miller’s photograph.
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DMJournal–Architecture and Representation
No. 3: Storytelling
Edited by Mark Dorrian and Paul Carter
ISSN 2753-5010 (Online)
ISBN (tbc)
About the author
Mark Dorrian is Editor-in-Chief of Drawing Matter Journal, holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, and is Co-Director of the practice Metis. His work spans topics in architecture and urbanism, art history and theory, and media studies. Dorrian’s books include Writing On The Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (2015), and the co-edited volume Seeing From Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (2013).
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