10/06/2026
I read a story recently, and it immediately reminded me of a portrait I captured this year.
Not just because of the bathtub. Although… you’ll see. 🤍
Have you ever heard of Lee Miller?
Lee started her career on the other side of the camera—as a model for Vogue in the 1920s. She was photographed, admired and known for her beauty.
But eventually, she decided she didn’t just want to be the woman in the photograph.
She wanted to be the one creating it.
Lee became a photographer, opened her own studio and ultimately became an accredited war correspondent during WWII. She photographed the Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and eventually some of the most horrific realities of the war, including the liberation of concentration camps.
And then came the photograph that made me think of this one.
In 1945, after photographing the liberation of Dachau, Lee entered Hitler’s apartment in Munich.
And she took a bath in his bathtub.
There is a now-famous portrait of Lee sitting in that tub, photographed by fellow war correspondent David Scherman. Her dirty combat boots—still carrying the mud from Dachau—sat on Hitler’s bathmat.
There’s something incredibly powerful about that image.
A woman who began her career being looked at had become the woman deciding what the world would see.
