The Art of Lee Miller, by Mark Haworth-BoothEvocations of Place, by Robert Elwall

In May 1963, Edwin Smith wrote to his wife, Olive Cook, from the Sussex village of Lindfield. A decade before, he had glimpsed Glasgow from the back of a Rolls-Royce and found it "not so much bad as utterly evil". Now, in this fold of the Low Weald, he discovered the Britain he had been looking for: a John Major-ish place of "pale burnt bricks" and "crooked Elizabethan Manors", of "fat sash windows" and Georgian parsonages. In the year of the Beatles and Wilson's white-hot technology, Smith's lens sought out lancet windows and abbey churchyards, misericords and Oxfordshire barns. After his death in 1971, Cook wrote that her husband's photographs had been "an expression of Englishness, for they reflected an essentially English mind". For better or worse, she was right.

Twenty miles away, in Chiddingly, another photographer was hard at work in May 1963. Lee Miller wasn't recording a Sussex idyll, though, in spite of living in the kind of place that would have made Smith swoon - an 18th-century pantiled house called Farley Farm. In fact, she wasn't recording at all. Miller hadn't taken a professional photograph for 10 years, having hung up her camera after a last Vogue assignment in 1953.

This had featured house guests at the farm - a deeply un-pastoral crew which included Max Ernst, the proto-Pop artist Richard Hamilton and the ex-director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr. Each was photographed performing some unconvincing bucolic task: Ernst weeding, Hamilton sewing curtains, Barr, in a homburg hat, feeding swill to pigs. After shooting "Working Guests", Miller put away her camera, crated her archive and banished both to the attic. Then she set about being the kind of housewife Smith would have wanted to live at Farley Farm; a mistress of the Aga, a dab hand with secateurs.

Every now and then, publishing throws up happy coincidences. Books have just appeared on Miller and Smith, both handsome, both in the same square format, both costing £35. Flicking from one to the other, you find yourself laughing. Life at Farley Farm - its rhythms unchanged for 200 years, its owners still handsome in their fifties - could so easily have been shot by Smith as corroboration of his happy England. Actually, Miller's husband, Roland Penrose, was ceaselessly faithless while his wife, born a century ago this year, was drinking herself to death. (She finally succeeded in 1977.) The Aga-stoking English Rose was a sexually abused American, and her best work, locked in the attic like Mrs Rochester, had been shot not in Sussex but Germany.

In April 1945, Miller entered Buchenwald concentration camp with the liberating American army. The ovens were still warm. In the early 1930s, she had worked with Man Ray in Paris, finding in the celebratory cruelty of Surrealism some echo of her own damaged life. Critically speaking, her career seems to divide in two: a frivolous phase of the 1930s, full of catwalks and sex; and the time post-1939, when she put away childish things and became a war photographer. Actually, as Mark Haworth-Booth's The Art of Lee Miller points out, Miller was a Surrealist before she knew about Surrealism and remained one to the day she died.

What makes her shots of a recently-defeated Germany so powerful isn't just their proof that she was there: so was Margaret Bourke-White, but her Buchenwald photographs aren't nearly so memorable. It is their casually appraising eye. In the midst not just of death but of death redefined, Miller homes in, idly, on the loose button on the armchair of the Bürgermeister of Leipzig's Daughter. That the girl, young and beautiful, has crushed a cyanide capsule between her teeth seems almost beside the point. Photography is a kind of shopping, and Miller shops with the bemused air of one who has been a commodity herself, who knows the horrors of choice.

Robert Elwall's Evocations of Place: The Photography of Edwin Smith shows quite a different kind of shopper. If Miller's buying is a form of self-projection, Smith's is one of self-extinction. The images in Elwall's book look as though they had existed in Platonic form and Smith had merely happened upon them. Tithe barns are underlit as tithe barns must be. Vatican colonnades cast long shadows and are haunted by priests in soutanes.

Smith described his method as "co-operating with the inevitable", by which he meant "faking inevitability". His wife, ever trusting, described his work as "incredibly romantic", which was truer than she knew. This is not to belittle it. Smith's business was providing reassurance, keeping a dead world alive. (Not for nothing was his biggest fan John Betjeman.) To that classical task he bought all the strategies of classicism: painterly composition, dramatic lighting, traditional subjects. He also cropped and re-touched mercilessly, using every trick in the darkroom to evoke a world where darkrooms wouldn't exist. Like Miller at Buchenwald, he set out to make the unbelievable believable. Like her, he succeeded. But seeing their work side-by-side, you can't help wondering what they would have made of each other; whether "photography" is a big enough word for them both.

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