Annie Leibovitz refers us to the experiences of Lee Miller.

Almost 80 years after World War II, on September 9, 2023, the film adaptation of Lee Miller's life was shown for the first time in Toronto: Lee, a 2023 British film directed by Ellen Kuras, adapted from the 1985 biography The live of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose.

The film visualizes the life of the model and photographer of Vogue Lee Miller (1907-1977) and offers viewers a view behind the camera of the images that are world famous today. For the premiere, Vogue commissioned the American photographer Annie Leibovitz to organize a photo shoot for an editorial about the newly released film. The result is a re-enactment of the scene in the film in which Lee Miller, played by Kate Winslet, took a selfie of herself in Hitler's bathtub. (April 30, 1945)

The photo of Annie Leibovitz not only shows the action behind Lee Miller's camera, as the film did, but also the action behind the film camera. Two people from the film crew, one of whom is Ellen Kuras can be seen directing the scene. Both people interact with people or objects that are not visible to the viewer of Annie Leibovitz's photograph due to the limited camera angle.

We can go further and look at the context of this photo. The events that took place behind the camera that day (April 30, 1945) can be described as follows:

0.3 meters behind the camera stands David Scherman. Lee Miller met the Jewish-American photographer during her work as a photojournalist on the war front in France. David Scherman himself worked for Life magazine and explored the origins of the Second World War together with Lee Miller.  David Scherman himself did also step in front of the camera that day (April 30, 1945) and position himself as a model in Hitler's bathtub. Lee Miller, who shoots the photo of him, changes the camera angle so that the shower head of the bathtub can be seen as a whole, which was not the case with Lee Miller's photo, which David Scherman had taken of her shortly before. According to Australian historian, Isabella Plaza, this new composition of the scene expands the connections to the researched Nazi crimes behind the camera frame. Lee Miller draws an even clearer connection to the crimes of the original owner of the bathroom with this new picture window, in which the entire shower head can now also be recognized, explains Plaza.

Almost 80 years later (October 2023), Annie Leibovitz's reinterpretation of Lee Miller's bathtub photo could be seen as if this change of camera angle had been imported by her. In her new composition, the viewer now also sees the entire shower head above Lee Miller's head, just as when looking at David Scherman's photograph.

2 meters behind the camera, a soldier stands in front of the bathroom door, waiting for his own bath. Years later, David Scherman recounts that this soldier is said to have knocked impatiently on the door so that he could take his own bath.

10 meters behind the camera, a party is going on in Adolf Hitler's former apartment. American soldiers are celebrating the liberation of the “capital of the movement”, as Munich was called by the National Socialists due to the rise of Hitler and the NSDAP that began here. During her time as a war journalist, Lee Miller only took a total of four photos of herself, which was to change after her arrival in Hitler's apartment. The photographer was not only fascinated by the intrusion into Hitler's private sphere, which she captured in more than 40 pictures, but also increasingly resumed her initial role as a model by taking more than 10 pictures of herself. She reconstructed various everyday actions of Hitler, such as sleeping in a bed, making herself beautiful in front of a mirror or washing in a bathtub.

2.36 kilometres away from the camera is the Marienplatz, Munich's town hall square. A few hours before this snapshot was taken, the birthplace of the Nazis was officially handed over to the Americans. The liberation of Munich on April 30th was almost defenceless, as the mayor had already fled a few days earlier for fear of having to face up to his crimes.

17.55 kilometres away from the camera is the Dachau concentration camp, which was liberated one day before Munich was taken. This camp was the first concentration camp built as a permanent facility, in which people labeled as prisoners by the Nazis were imprisoned just one month after Hitler came to power. Lee Miller and David Scherman arrive at the crime scene on the morning of the day they capture Hitler's private apartment. In the concentration camp, the two photographers document piles of corpses, which were only extracted from the cremation because the fuel for the incinerators had run out five days earlier; skeleton-like people who, despite being liberated, were unable to leave their sleeping places due to their weakness; SS guards who took their own lives out of fear of upcoming punishments. Lee Miller later wears the dirt and suffering of this place on her shoes in Hitler's bathroom and has it absorbed by Hitler's bath mat (white towel). The resulting dirty floor towel acts as a metaphor for the crimes that Lee Miller had seen before and reflects them in a subtle way.

502 kilometres away from the camera lies the Führerbunker in Berlin. This is where Adolf Hitler commits suicide half an hour before the liberation of Munich and a few hours before Lee Miller breaks into his bathroom. This final act of escape is published a day later by the American media, sealing the end of the Second World War in Europe.

943 kilometres away from the camera is the office of the English Conde Nast publishing house, which publishes British Vogue. Lee Miller's documentation of the Second World War in Germany, consisting of photos and texts, arrived here a few weeks later. The publisher hired the photographer as a war reporter in 1942 and added texts and pictures about the war to their articles on fashion and beauty. Lee Miller's photos, which showed the crimes of the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp, were published in the July 1945 issue, after the end of the Second World War in Europe. However, in order not to overshadow the British population's sense of victory, only three snapshots of the crimes are included in the issue. Even the size of the images is reduced compared to the US edition.

6,484 kilometers away from the camera is the American Vogue office in New York. Due to the ongoing war in the Pacific, Lee Miller's pictures are published here in full size. Nevertheless, the small number of 3 pictures of the Dachau concentration camp remains. This seemingly small number of published photos of the crimes was nevertheless shocking at the time. Until the end of the world war, press publications were forbidden to publish pictures of dead people or destroyed buildings that were not connected to the Nazis. Particularly in the case of records of Nazi extermination camps, there were initially concerns about their publication, as there was a fear that the population might see these photos as propaganda material. This fear can also be felt in Lee Miller's texts accompanying the pictures, in which she repeatedly asks the reader to “believe” the truth of the images.

After this snapshot in Hitler's bathroom and the end of the Second World War, Lee Miller struggles with the horrors she has experienced. She tries to erase the moments trapped in her head with the neurotoxin alcohol and falls into an alcohol addiction. After the war, she made a further attempt to erase the moments by visiting the Vogue offices in London to destroy her archived photos in order to prevent “anyone from seeing what I (Lee Miller) saw”. These actions and the small number of published images show how hard it is to face this reality of crime on a daily basis.

Today, the picture of Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub is famous, even more than her pictures of the concentration camps. It is the first image that appears when you search for the photographer on Google, and is the only image explicitly mentioned in the introduction of the German Wikipedia article about her. It underlines how difficult the act of visualizing the crimes of the Nazis is. If not even the photographer of these images wants to see them, how can we manage to keep these images in our minds without being broken by them?  It is a difficult balance between remembering and forgetting.

Annie Leibovitz's reinterpretation of the original image (shot on April 30, 1945) can remind the viewer of the image of what was happening behind the camera. Her picture not only highlights the symbolic strengths an image can have, but also illuminates the informative weaknesses of an image. A photograph only captures a specific moment, and only a small section of that moment. For photojournalistic work in particular, it is important to obtain insightful information. To do this, it is necessary to explore the moments before and after the snapshot in order to gain an understanding through the image. Photojournalism, as can be inferred from Annie Leibovitz's picture, needs additional information to create clarity. The viewer must also question, research and read what is/was going on outside the picture. Annie Leibovitz's picture challenges us to do this.