Went down a bit of a rabbit hole this morning and fell into something I find interesting, disturbing, beautiful, and all together intriguing.

It started with Chris Marker (director of La Jetee which if you didn’t know they are remaking with AI which is surreal in its own right) and landed me on Model/Photog/badass Lee Miller.

Miller’s life is larger then her work which in itself is larger then life. A student and lover of Man Ray she is beyond a creative powerhouse, and her photography’s power cannot be understated. She tells volumes in 1/250th of a second.

What cranked me up was her famous picture I believe is entitled “Woman in Hitlers Bathtub“. The story goes that after seeing the most amazing atrocities of WWII and sharing raw images of concentration camps with the world through Vogue, Miller gets word of the impossible, a place in Munich that has the holy trinity: coal, running water, and electricity. That could mean only one thing, a hot bath.

The place in question happened to be Adolf Hitler’s apartment.

She preceded to take a well deserved bath in Hitler’s bathtub. The photograph the was born from this moment is one of my favorites. There are layers and layers of meaning that are both surreal and photo-journalistic. Grounded and other worldly. It is a masterpiece on multiple levels.

The rabbit hole that makes it even more profound, more perverse and interesting however is that there are other dimensions where this photo exists. A tesseract of images that when seen together do something wicked and wonderful to the meaning of the picture.

From left to right you have this spectrum of reality. First, a behind the scene’s photograph of Annie Leibovitz recreating Lee Miller’s photograph with Kate Winslet for the film “Lee”. Then you have the photograph from Leibovitz camera, a hauntingly recreation of the original. Then you have the color version of Miller’s famous photograph, not often seen. Then the infamous black and white version that went to publication. Finally you have an image of David Sherman, who was Lee Miller’s Jewish lover, in the tub, which Miller took.

What electrifies me is the world within a world one image expands into. To the left a future where this moment in time is recreated, relived, and revived through the focus of multiple lenses and a photographer as brilliant as the original, and also now through a Jewish perspective. The color version of the original is haunting to me, adding a cold dose of reality to the stoic black and white classic version. Then moving backwards in time, seeing behind the curtain so to speak with the image of Miller’s lover Sherman in the tub, a completely different perspective, both personal and intimate. The last image to me is so powerful and unsettling, with both photographers, the Economist magazine explains, choreographed with extreme care:

“She cannot be shown nude (this is LIFE, not Man Ray); a figurine on the table does the trick. In front of the bath, her combat boots, “the dust of Dachau still on them” according to Scherman. And at the back on the left, the portrait. It is a voodoo gesture, the sort her Surrealist friends would approve of, an all-American blend of sass, violence and sex. Nuts to you, Führer! I am naked in your bath with my Jewish lover, we are taking your picture’s picture, we are stealing your life-force.“

It was a wonderful discover this morning over green tea. I think the power of this compounding of images, and the reason I feel compelled to share it, is that art is never done, especially when art is created with the goal of societal impact. The meaning of this one frame reverberates through time, both forward and backwards, and its weight gravitational in proportion. I unknowingly was caught up in its orbit, circling back around this image a quarter century after I first learned of it much like a comet, only to see it in a whole new light.

And if you are unfamiliar with the powerhouse that is Lee Miller, then I suggest watching this short doc by her granddaughter to get to know her a bit better.