Armed with her new accreditation, Lee Miller became a photojournalist. Her first assignments were dedicated to the silent protagonists of the war – women – and to the role they played during the conflict: the nurses of the US Army, the WRENS (the female branch of the Royal Navy) and the anti-aircraft searchlight operators. This project, created in collaboration with David E. Scherman, was a real success: while Lee and David were working, an air raid hit the projectionist’s station. The resulting photos were published in both the American and English editions of Vogue.
However, Lee continued to alternate these assignments with those created for fashion, but, being no longer able to hide from the tragic nature of the events, she decided to shoot among the rubble of London, inaugurating a new photographic style that would also be very successful in the United States.
In 1944, Vogue illustrated at least five or six articles per issue with photographs by Lee Miller. However, she was unsatisfied with the texts that accompanied her images and as a result asked to write them herself. She did so in a hard, emotional and shrewd style, thus beginning to work in a way that would be more solitary than expected for her. Ironically, the subject of the first article entirely written and illustrated by Miller is Ed Murrow, a famous American journalist.
The first color photographs by Lee Miller also date back to 1944 and Vogue uses one of these for the cover of the June issue. If the publication forced Lee into specific formats that limited her creativity, her skills as a writer had now reached full maturity and were ready for a new chapter.