Lee Miller. Tate Britain

2 October 2025 – 15 February 2026

 

 

There are a great many extraordinary images in this exhibition.  Lee Miller had a genuine photographer’s eye for composition and quirky detail.  In David E.  Scherman dressed for war, London 1942, for example, she obviously spotted the similarity in the shape of the camera lens and the three circles of the gas mask.  And having her subject posing under what might have been a beach umbrella adds another level of surrealism.

Tate Britain’s new show is the largest ever exhibition of Miller’s work and we get to know what a remarkable and varied life she had.  Last year Kate Winslet’s biographical film Lee told us a good deal about Miller’s incredible work during World War II.  Here we can learn most of the rest.

Born in 1907 in New York State, photography enveloped Miller from early childhood.  She had to model for her keen amateur photographer father, often completely naked, right up to her twenties.  She had also suffered a serious sexual assault from a family friend when very young, resulting in a gonorrhoea infection which necessitated invasive and difficult treatments.  From this traumatic background (not mentioned in the exhibition’s literature) she emerged as a rebellious, brazenly confident and brave young woman, very attractive and uncompromisingly resistant to the conformity expected of females of the time.  She changed her name from Elizabeth to Lee and soon became a successful model: slim, with close-cropped her, an androgynous look which embodied 1920’s and 1930’s chic.  She regularly appeared in the American and British editions of Vogue.

“I’d rather take a picture than be one,” Miller is reported to have said.  Thus the transition to work behind the camera and, having shot fashion pictures in New York, in 1929 a move to Paris.  She approached Man Ray, seventeen years her senior and one of the city’s leading photographers, demanding to be his apprentice.  He was resistant.  She was insistent.  Soon they were partners, in work and in life, and together they collaborated on some of the most iconic fashion images of the time.  In the milieu of French Surrealism, Miller was totally at home in the presence of such figures as Picasso, Paul Eluard and Jean Cocteau.  The exhibition shows us Cocteau’s short surrealist film Le Sang d’un Poète (The Blood of a Poet), in which Miller plays a classical statue coming to life, driving the poet to madness.

Miller’s own photography now asserted itself.  She roamed around Paris, finding new ways of portraying familiar objects and unleashing her imagination.

I particularly liked Untitled (Two priests), Arc de Triomphe.  c 1930-32 in which she isolates the two figures against a heavy sky, one with a raised index finger, as if admonishing the sinners below.  Even more extraordinary from this period is Untitled (Severed breast from radical surgery), Paris, c.1930.  This derived from her documenting surgeries in a Paris hospital.  She removed the organ (we don’t know how) and placed it on a dinner plate as a transgressive surrealist tableau.  Miller, and Ray, often raised questions about the representation of female bodies and probed the link between pleasure and violence.  Miller was always fascinated by human desire beyond conventional limits, both in her work and in her relationships.

The second broad stage of Miller’s career, after something of a break, came with her relocation to Cairo following her marriage to a wealthy Egyptian businessman.  Starting in 1935 she traveled through the Egyptian desert and to Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus, Romania and Greece.  Again her originality of approach shines through.  From the top of the Great Pyramid, Giza, c.1938 does not show the ancient pyramid itself but its shadow, cutting like a sharp triangle into the tangled city and Nile valley below.  From Romania we see the astonishing Dancing bears with Roma trainers, Romania, 1938.

War was looming.  Back in London, with new lover Roland Penrose, and refusing the offer of a safe return to the United States, Miller reconnected with Vogue.  She shot fashion, cleverly juxtaposing the elegance of contemporary style with the devastation of the blitz.  Note, in Model (Elizabeth Cowell) wearing Digby Morton suit, London, 1941, how the curvature of the arch is mirrored by that of the ostentatious feather.

But Miller was also drawn inexorably to the role of British women helping the war effort.  Her photojournalism started here.  She photographed women mechanics, pilots, journalists and searchlight operators.

In 1942 Miller became an accredited war correspondent with the US Army but, being a woman, was denied access to the war zone.  That changed after D-Day and, accompanying the troops to Europe, we reach the zenith of her career as a photojournalist.  Another talent comes to light – she can write.

“In Alsace, the mountain towns nestled in dazzling ravines, cosy and soft.  The houses were roofed with snow, thick and furry, the wires, calvaries, the sheds, wagons, and even the footsteps were padded.

Silently, the women slapped laundry at the water’s edge.  Mutely, the children slid on slippery paths.  The town-crier pantomimed, nuns floated past, three figures, turbanned and gowned like the Magi, walked down the road, with bread.  A sound-less, romantic Christmas-card world, ice-laden firs and half-timbered houses.

Acutely colourful as a Brueghel, the human figures had as strange proportions as they had missions.  The steam rising from the icy water hid the khaki and blood stains in the linen.  The Magi were Goums, the fierce North African fighters in their homespun robes.  And the silence was our deafness from the clanking, grinding roar of a French armoured division, anachronistic and as shocking in this setting as a moustache on the Mona Lisa.”

Her editors in London and New York were thrilled.  ‘There is great excitement all over the office when your material comes in,’ they told her.  Miller witnessed the battle of St.  Malo, the advance into Alsace, and travelled on into Germany to record her most harrowing images of all: the just liberated concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald and the piles of human corpses the Nazis did not have time to hide.  She also recorded the camp guard with the smashed-in face and the piles of discarded clothing and possessions.  To overcome any reluctance that Vogue might have had about publishing, she cabled her editor in London: ‘I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THAT THIS IS TRUE’.  In the exhibition these images are set aside in a separate enclosure.

Again, with the confidence and bravery we have come to expect, she muscled her way into Hitler’s Munich apartment and with fellow photographer David E Scherman they carefully staged each of them enjoying a long overdue soak in the Fuhrer’s bathtub, her dirty boots muddying the bathmat – images which brilliantly poked fun at the fascist leader.  She continued to record the end and the aftermath of war.  I was particularly struck by The deputy Bürgermeister’s daughter (Regina Lisso), Leipzig Town Hall, 1945 (slumped in the corner of a sofa, having committed suicide), Mrs Doris Lauffs’ children at their home, Heidelberg, 1945 and Execution of László Bárdossy, fascist ex-Prime Minister of Hungary, Budapest, 1946.

After the war Lee Miller settled into a quieter life in rural Sussex, curating many arts projects and enjoying the company of and portraying her numerous famous friends.  Pablo Picasso was the one she photographed the most.  But the horrors of what she had witnessed wouldn’t leave her and she fell into depression and alcoholism, dying in 1977.

This is a stunning exhibition of work by a remarkably perceptive and innovative artist and special credit must go to the curators whose research has unearthed images previously not known about and featuring many photographs printed by Miller herself.  I suggest you choose the time of your visit carefully – many of the pictures are quite small and I expect the crowds to be large.  But please, do go.

© Graham Buchan 2025.