#davy scherman

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ANDY SAMBERG as David Scherman in Lee (2023) ♡︎ LIKE if you use!

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Kate Winslet and Andy Samberg as Lee Miller and David (Davy) Scherman in LEE (2023)

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Kate Winslet and Andy Samberg as Lee Miller and David E. Scherman in Lee (2023)

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KATE WINSLET and ANDY SAMBERG as war correspondents Lee Miller and David (Davy) Scherman in LEE (2023). Over the course of the war, David and Lee became close friends, lovers and, at times, collaborators. With David working for LIFE Magazine and Lee for Vogue, their paths continually crossed in Europe after D-Day.

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yeah that’s what i tell my coworkers all the time

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i keep going back to the movie past lives and how nora always dreams and sleep-talks in korean. her husband, arthur, an american, says: “sometimes i guess i get scared. you dream in a language i can’t understand. it’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where i can’t go.”

i think about that line a lot. about memory as language. about how certain people carry a version of the world inside them, a particular vocabulary that nobody else can access, except for the others who were there.

we have evidence that both lee miller and david e. scherman died with emotional scars from the war. and as much as they tried to live full lives after the war (and their relationship, both as lovers and collaborators) — with marriages and children and career reinventions and accolades — there was still that whole place inside of them where no one else could go but each other.

i guess in a way, lee and davy shared a language only they knew how to speak. a coded understanding of each other's trauma. their spouses didn’t get it. their kids didn’t get it. the world didn’t get it — and to be fair, how could they? the concept of PTSD as we know it today didn’t exist. they called it “shell shock” back then, and even that didn’t come close to covering it.

we see their pictures and articles now as historical records. documents of war. but that was their way of speaking. their way of saying to each other: i saw it too. i was there too. you’re not crazy. it was the only language they had to make sense of the things they witnessed.

and now we look at those photos with a kind of respectful distance, as we should. we can admire them, study them, even feel moved by them. but we weren’t there. we’ll never really understand what it felt like to be young and alive in a time like that. to be learning how to love someone while also trying not to die. to watch the world fall apart through a camera lens. to see death so often that it starts to feel like background noise.

it’s not romantic. it’s not glamorous. but that’s how languages are born, isn’t it? not from textbooks or classrooms, but from necessity. from survival. from two people in the same impossible place, looking at each other and going, you see it too? you’re here, and i’m here too. and this thing we’re witnessing — it’s too big, too terrifying, too real to leave unnamed, so let’s name it together.

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Davy Scherman fun fact of the day: he can build a country house with his own hands, sing the words to any popular song (and all of Gilbert and Sullivan) and strike up such sweet melodies on an ocarina that friends have called him the Heifetz of the sweet potato.

Source: Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (bonus: a picture of the real DES and more details about his impressive career as a LIFE Magazine photographer and editor!)