Visual Testimony: Lee Miller’s Dachau

This essay examines images of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp taken by American war correspondent and photographer Lee Miller. Miller’s work is mobilized as an optic through which to grasp the shock of confronting the Nazi camps. Her images are read as a form of visual testimony. That is, although they fail to provide a transparent view of what occurred in the Nazi lagers, they are nevertheless inscribed with all that the photographer did not know of the events to which she bore witness. The nature of this strange unintelligibility is what the author pursues: the visual inscription of the unspeakable as a disquieting resource for thinking through the paradoxes of witnessing and the transmission of human experience.