This is a quite amazing exhibition, a complete eye-opener not only regarding Lee Miller’s extraordinary range and ability as a photographer and her staggering achievement in so many different fields – but at the same time a portrait of an astonishingly blessed and yet, in parts, harrowing life.
This is the largest retrospective of Miller’s work ever staged and easily fills 11 decent-sized rooms. It features 230 vintage and modern prints, many (especially her wonderful Second World War shots) on show for the first time. You might think that’s a lot of items to take in but if anything it’s not enough. I could easily have lapped up more.
The show also includes a wide range of supporting material, including original copies of the many magazines her work appeared in, numerous copies of Vogue as well as wartime publications.
Quick overview
A quick overview would refer to Miller’s success as:
- a fashion model
- a muse and icon for avant-garde photographers
- an actor in an avant-garde film
- a core member of French surrealism
- a collaborator with the great Man Ray
- a travel photographer in the Middle East
- a fashion photographer for Vogue in the 1930s and through the first years of the Second World War
- a war photographer, at first in Britain among air crews and suchlike, before being early on the scene at the D-Day landings and at the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps
- in post-war life hosting her artist friends at the country house in Sussex she shared with husband Roland Penrose
- a late-blooming interest in cordon bleu cookery
In room after room, in one area after another, the visitor comes across amazing photos in a wide range of genres. It’s a staggering achievement and this is a thrilling, mind-boggling exhibition.
The exhibition
As I mentioned the exhibition is in 11 rooms. I’ll give a quick summary of each, with an indication of favourite photos.
Room 1. Fashion model
Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York State. Her father was a keen amateur photographer and she posed frequently for him from early childhood. She began modelling professionally in New York City in 1926 (aged 18) while studying painting at the Art Students League. In March 1927, aged just 19, she appeared on the covers of British and American Vogue, drawn in pearls and furs against a glittering city skyline. She was photographed by celebrated figures like Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen and room 1 is full of wonderfully atmospheric 1920s photo shoots.
Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain showing Miller in 1920s cloche hat and furs © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania)
The photos bring out her height, her strikingly long neck, the rather big nose which gives her a slightly tomboy, androgynous look, which perfectly suited the 1920s era of slender flappers.
The experience of being a model inspired her to become a photographer herself, declaring she would ‘rather take a picture than be one.’ Not only that, but she wanted to be at the cutting edge of photography, which was Europe. So in 1929 she moved to Paris.
Room 2. Association with Man Ray
With extraordinary courage, ambition and chutzpah, Miller tracked down Paris’s leading avant-garde photographer, (the American) Man Ray and announced that she was to be his new student. ‘I told him boldly I was his new student. He said he didn’t take students and anyway he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I’m going with you – and I did.’
Impressed by her looks, confidence and evident ability, Man Ray took her not as a student but as an active collaborator, both a model for many of his most famous photos and a photographer in her own right, and then lover.
The famous photo of a woman’s bottom as she kneels forward, revealing her feet, that’s Miller, along with scores of other striking and iconic images.
This room explains how they jointly stumbled across the process of solarisation, the process where a negative or print is partially re-exposed to light during development, leading to a tone reversal effect where bright areas become dark and vice versa. You can see an example on the left in this photo.
Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania)
The Blood of a Poet
Very quickly Miller was established at the centre of Paris’s surrealism circle. In her role as model, she was invited by Jean Cocteau to star in his ground-breaking surrealist film, Le Sang d’un poète, 1930. In it she appears as a classical statue which comes to life. In a darkened room off to one side, you can watch a 3-minute excerpt.
Room 3. The surreal streets of Paris
By the early 1930s, Miller was fully embedded in Paris’s avant-garde circles, in particular befriending artists associated with surrealism, the movement that rebelled against convention and advocated an aesthetic of chance, randomness and the uncanny.
Having established her own studio, Miller took to photographing the City of Light and created a dazzling series of images. Using the avant-garde strategies of photographing everything from above, from an angle, incorporating disorientating reflections – she rendered everyday sights in the city mysterious and surreal.
My favourites were a pair of bird cages set against the ornate metalwork of a shop window. Or the really surreal one of a woman reaching her hand up and behind her to touch her hairdo in a hairdressers’ but which makes the hand look like an alien creature. Tate press give us this one to use, of a sheet of semi-congealed tar oozing across the pavement towards a pair of anonymous feet. All of them weird and wonderful and inspiring.
Untitled, Paris 1930 by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
Returning to New York in 1932, she set up Lee Miller Studios Inc. and opened her first solo exhibition. In both the United States and Europe, Miller exhibited regularly alongside fellow pioneers of modern photography and her work was published in numerous artistic journals and magazines.
Room 4. Egypt and other destinations
By 1934 Miller had spent two years running a commercial studio in Depression-era New York and felt burnt out by the repetitive demands of high-profile clients and brands. In that year she met the Egyptian businessman and engineer Aziz Eloui Bey, who had come to New York City to buy equipment for the Egyptian National Railways, and they were married.
- Aziz Eloui Bey (1938)
At first Miller renounced photography entirely. thanks to her rich husband she no longer needed to earn a living. But a trip to Jerusalem in 1935 reignited her creative spark, and she returned to the camera as a tool of experiment and exploration. Over the next four years, Miller made regular expeditions across remote Egyptian deserts, as well as through Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus, Romania and Greece.
- Bird Rock (1937)
This room contains lots of stunning images from these trips, images of the desert, tracks in the sand, decrepit cars, a pile of sandals made from car tyres, the strange and disorientating architecture of the desert world.
Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb near Siwa 1937 by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
In Cairo Miller took a photograph of the desert near Siwa that Magritte saw and used as inspiration for his 1938 painting Le Baiser. Miller also contributed an object to the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition at the London Gallery in 1934. There’s a great one of bleached snail shells on an old tree.
The room also includes striking black-and-white images of peasants in Greece, Albania and the other ‘exotic’ countries she visited during this period. All of them are good, some are outstanding. I particularly liked the one with the three Albanian peasants and their two bears.
By 1937, Miller had grown bored with her life in Cairo. She returned to Paris and went to a party the day she arrived, where she reconciled with Man Ray, and met the British surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose who she would marry in May 1947.
Room 5. Arty friends
Charismatic, creative and intelligent, Miller befriended many of the leading artists and intellectuals of her day and throughout her carer created striking, candid, intimate portraits of them.
‘It takes time to do a good portrait … [and] find out what idea of himself or herself he has in mind.’
There’s a set of entertaining ones of Charlie Chaplin, who claimed the shoot was one of the most entertaining days of his life, and best of which appeared in a popular French cinema magazine as well as in modernist photography exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic.
With Picasso Miller had a long and fruitful relationship, taking over 1,000 photos of him during their lives.
- Picasso and Dora Maar (1937)
- Picasso and Claude Picasso (1949)
- Picasso with baby from his sculpture Femme à la poussette (1954)
- Picasso and Georges Braque, La Fournas (1954)
- Picasso by Lee Miller (1958)
- Picasso with Roland Penrose in front of ‘The Three Dancers’ painted in 1925 (1965)
Having returned to Paris in 1937, she took intimate portraits of the surrealists in the troubled period of the late-30s, many of them jolly snaps of larky group holidays. These include Eileen Agar, Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, Leonora Carrington and many more.
Room 6. Vogue and war
Miller moved back from Paris to London to join her lover, Roland Penrose, in September 1939, just as World War Two kicked off.
As a US citizen, Miller was ineligible for war work in the UK and so she offered her services to British Vogue. Before long, with more established figures tied up, she was the magazine’s leading photographer, and this room contains some of her wonderful, inspired photoshoots in wartime London, including shots of the editorial staff busking it after the offices were Blitzed.
Room 7. Photographing the Blitz and women’s war
From 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941 London was blanket bombed by the Germans. Some 30,000 people were killed during the Blitz but Miller wasn’t the only one to notice the bizarre and surreal imagery produced by intensive bombing of urban landscapes. Placing pristine, beautifully dressed models in tailored outfits against the rubble created jarring but striking images. The Blitz was a whole new look.
Model Elizabeth Cowell wearing Digby Morton suit, London 1941 by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
All aspects of wartime life inspired Miller, from a documentary news-style photo like:
To consciously surreal compositions like:
Fire Masks by Lee Miller (1941) Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
And a great one of a melted typewriter, titled Remington Silent to jokily echo the Remington typewriter company’s advertising claim that their typewriters were very quiet. Well, this one’s never going to bother anyone again.
Her sense of humour was never far away.
David E. Scherman dressed for war, London 1942 by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
Many of Miller’s Blitz photographs were published as a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941). Although intended primarily for a US audience, it proved highly popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and there are several copies open to various pages here in a display case.
At least ten of her photographs were also included in ‘Britain at War’, an influential exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Touring North and South America over the next three years, these works shaped international perceptions of the Blitz.
Women’s war
Several walls here hold photos describing women’s lives in war. British women, conscripted for the first time from 1941, poured into the workplace. Miller took inspiration photos of women working as mechanics, journalists and searchlight operators, a striking photo of a woman fighter pilot in her cockpit, her photos were a vital contributions to the war effort.
- Wrens parachute packing factory (1941)
- A Polish pilot [Anna Leska] who flies a Spitfire for the A.T.A. (1942)
- Wrens’ Airbourne radio mechanic (1944)
Room 8. In warzones
Once the USA had joined the war (Japan. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941) Miller was able to apply to become an accredited war correspondent with the US Army. This she did in late 1942. She continued to take photos of war work in Britain. it was only after the Normandy landings of June 1944, that she – like most correspondents – was able to follow the army into combat.
This room contains vivid photos of the Normandy beaches still littered with wreckage, and then a series depicting the claustrophobic lamplit environment of army field hospitals, and then photos of sometimes grossly injured soldiers in their makeshift beds.
Most of these stories were produced for Vogue with whom she’d kept all her contacts. She produced a regular supply of not only photos but reporting to accompany them. Up till now she hadn’t written much but she proved a natural journalist, producing vivid first-hand descriptions of what she saw as she followed the US Army in its fiercely contested progress across Europe.
Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain showing the case containing Miller’s war correspondent uniform and, at the left hip, her lightweight Rolleiflex camera (photo by the author)
She turned out to have the journalist’s fundamental skill, being in the right place at the right time. In France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary and Romania she produced a range of images: some, as mentioned, of field hospitals, others artillery exploding on nearby buildings. In many of them she drew on the surrealist aesthetic to bring out the absurdity as well as the stupid cruelty of war.
Room 9. The Holocaust
The war thread reaches a peak of horror in room 9. This displays the photos Miller took after entering Buchenwald concentration CAMP on 16 April 1945, soon after it had been liberated. Two weeks later, on 30 April, she visited Dachau, a concentration camp near Munich. Thirty-five years later I went to Dachau.
Most of these photos have never been seen before. They show piles of bones or prisoners so starved they were little more than skin and bones.
- A pile of starved bodies (1945)
The trains pulling cattle wagons which used to be packed full of victims, now bestilled in the summer heat with just a few corpses lying around on the gravel. There’s a sequence showing Nazi camp guards who have been soundly thrashed. And one which really stuck in my mind, a discomfortingly idyllic one of a dead German camp guard floating in a ditch or canal – a kind of mid-twentieth century version of Millais’s Ophelia, which hangs not far away in Tate Britain.
Miller’s Rolleiflex camera had no zoom lens and so, in order to get the shots, she had to get very close to the subjects, to all those piles of corpses, to the starved inmates dying of disease in the barracks. Up close with the worst evil in history.
This is a devastating subject, Miller captured images with her usual skill and eye for detail, but the experience marked her for life.
Months later, she was among the first to reach Hitler’s weekend retreat at Berchtesgarten just as American GIs began to loot it. In images overflowing with historical irony, she and her war photographer comrade David E. Scherman photographed each other taking baths in Hitler’s own personal bath The sight of the enemy cavorting in the most private inner sanctum of the great Leader rammed home the message of total defeat. It also represented the par washing off the filth and grime of months living through the apocalypse which the deranged leader started. And, for Scherman who was Jewish, a particularly sweet and apposite revenge on the Antisemite-In-Chief.
- Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath (Facebook page)
Unbeknown to Miller and Scherman as they set up these shots, just a few hours later Hitler and Eva Braun would commit suicide in their bunker in Berlin and the war in Europe would soon be over.
Room 10. War’s aftermath
But the suffering wasn’t over, not for tens of millions of people, not by a long chalk. The war left unthinkable devastation all across Europe.
- Women and ruins (1945)
Miller continued photographing and reporting into 1946 and recorded how the euphoria of liberation gave way to disillusionment. Her images and writing show people facing mass displacement, starvation and disease. Much of this is covered in Keith Lowe’s harrowing history of the war’s aftermath:
She travelled in eastern Europe, capturing the poverty of really dirt-poor peasants. There’s an extraordinary photo of the public execution of László Bárdossy, the fascist ex-Prime Minister of Hungary, on 10 January 1946.
Throughout she maintained her eye for the surreal detail, the sur- in the real.
- The eyes of Sibiu (1946)
She went out of her way to photograph children, believing they represented the future everyone now had to build towards, but this quote shows her acrid realism:
‘I’m taking a lot of kid pictures, because they are the only ones for whom there is any hope … And also we might as well have a look at who we’re going to fight twenty years from now.’
Room 11. At home in Sussex
Happily married Finally it was over, Miller quit being a correspondent and returned to England. After she discovered she was pregnant by her long-time lover, the artist Roland Penrose, she divorced her Egyptian husband Bey and, on 3 May 1947, married Penrose. Their only son, Antony Penrose, was born on 9 September 1947.
Happy home In 1949 the couple bought Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex. During the 1950s and 1960s Farley Farm became a popular resort for visiting artists such as Picasso, Man Ray, Oskar Kokoschka, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Jean Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Humphrey Jennings and many more…
Cookery In the 1950s Miller drifted away from photography and became increasingly interested in cordon bleu cookery, developing her own eccentric and humorous recipes. But her mental health was problematic. What she’d seen so close-up during the war cast a shadow over the rest of her life.
In this final room are many of the photos she took of the artistic giants of the twentieth century who were also her friends, as well as a charming display case showing magazine features about her staid, domestic home life.
Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain showing a photospread in a 1973 edition of Home and Gardens featuring the interior of her Sussex home complete with some of her cooking (photo by the author)
Sometimes Miller claimed that her photographic archive had been destroyed. The true extent of her work was only discovered after her death in 1977. The roughly 60,000 negatives, prints, journals and ephemera uncovered in the family attic now form the basis of the Lee Miller Archives and this exhibition represents a dazzling opportunity to delve into those archives and savour their countless treasures.
Summary
What an amazing life! What a prodigious, multifaceted talent! And what a brilliant exhibition!
Promo video
Related links
- Lee Miller continues at Tate Britain until 15 February 2026
- Exhibition guide
- Large print guide i.e. all the wall captions
- ‘She had to cover war in a different way’ (Tate article)
- ‘I’d rather take a picture than be one’ (Tate article)
- Lee Miller archives
Books & Boots 
