Some people have a knack for always popping up in the right place at the right time. The photographer Lee Miller was certainly one such person. How useful, then, that she had the means and inclination to record the events she witnessed for posterity. Clearly Miller had the drive for greatness, and the compelling character to realise it. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, at the age of 19 she was snatched up by Vogue to model in its glossy spreads: the ever eagle-eyed Condé Nast had scouted her, and simultaneously saved her from being run over, on a New York streets. In Paris she learned the camera technique of solarisation, a kind of halo effect, at the side of Man Ray and cavorted around town with the soon-to-be-renowned Surrealists. Marrying in 1934, she briefly flew off to live in Egypt, but she quickly ditched that life for the freedom of Paris and later the glittering notoriety of intellectual and artistic Hampstead. Thereafter, she went on to witness and record the horrors of World War II in France and Germany, and subsequently found peace in the gardens of southern England.
And it is exactly this breadth of experience that Lee Miller: Photographs reveals. It is an edited version of Miller’s photographic catalogue, condensed to a hundred choice images by her son, Antony Penrose. For the most part, the works have been left to speak for themselves; which they do, eloquently. After a brief foreword by Kate Winslet, who portrays Miller in the 2023 biopic Lee, and an insightful introduction by Penrose, the texts cut directly to the emotional and historical core of Miller’s work. Separated into nine chronological chapters, the black-and-white plates – most of which were taken with her favoured Rolleiflex camera – fill the page with shock and allure in equal measure. In its variety, her work is indicative of what she called ‘my restlessness – my itchy bottom’: once she had photographed an experience, she was on to the next.
In such a tightly edited selection, it is significant, and correct, that the disturbing images of the Nazi concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald, which Miller photographed when they were liberated in 1945, are included – both for the historical record and for the perception of Miller’s work itself. While many of her photographs are beautiful, they are not primarily about beauty. That is apparent when they are placed next to the war photographs, similar in style and composition, of her contemporary Cecil Beaton. While Beaton’s lens is soft, gentle and always romantically inclined, Miller’s is harsh and invariably probing. As Winslet puts it in her foreword, Miller knew that ‘you don’t just take a shot, you make it’.
Ultimately her photographs seem to be about how one chooses to see. Thus, the 1942 image David E. Scherman Dressed for War reads as a signal of intent. The dark, round goggles of his gas mask seem to symbolise a new way of looking; like the black eye of the camera lens, the tool that would be used to record it. In the introduction, Penrose describes his mother as a born Surrealist. Anyone familiar with the iconography of Surrealist art will know that eyes are a common theme. They appear over and over again as symbols of an awakened unconscious. Indeed, it is Miller’s eye that forms the pinnacle of the perpetually ticking needle of Man Ray’s metronome: a striking symbol for her restless, probing vision. And it is this relentless search for a new engagement with the world that appears in her photographs, fizzing with all that is strange, awkward and sometimes even obscene.
This is clearest in her war reportage. But it also comes through in her fashion editorial and personal photography, which likewise displays her cunning eye for the unusual. A model poised, contrapposto, in a leopard-trimmed skirt suit, for example, obliquely observes a hat stand of military headwear for Vogue in 1939; or the portrait of her friend and Surrealist model Nusch Eluard, whose head appears over the side of a car squinting serenely like a sphinx. Perhaps because she had been a model herself, one who switched sides of the camera to record rather than be recorded, her subjects always have startling presence and stature. A personal favourite of mine is the snapshot of illustrator Saul Steinberg wrestling with a watering hose in East Sussex, casually resembling the dying son of Laocoön in the famous marble grouping. One feels instantly Miller’s lightness of touch; her incisive instinct for the power of composition and the capturing of a fleeting moment.
It is worth flipping to the back of the book to cast an eye over the footnotes to some of the plates. While each entry is no more than two sentences long, each gives a zingy insight into both the social context of Miller’s work as well as her own perception of her subjects. Pablo Picasso, for instance, thought Miller’s portrait of Surrealist artist Eileen Agar silhouetted against Brighton Pavilion made her appear pregnant; replying to Agar, who protested that it was just her camera, he supposedly said ‘Exactly, pregnant with a camera’. Another note records Miller’s comparing the chiaroscuro of her photograph of a Normandy battlefield operating tent with Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Christ Carrying the Cross. These fragments convey the glamour of her swirling social circle, and an intense engagement with the meaning of the imagery she produced. Drawing such parallels illuminates not merely her aesthetic but also her intellectual concerns.
Looking at these photographs together, one is clear that not many artists of her generation saw with more piercing or perceptive eyes than Lee Miller. The visions captured in her imagery, especially her pictures of the war, haunted her for the rest of her life. Yet she had an utter compulsion to set down what she had seen. In so doing she made herself one of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century; as well as one of the first to sublimate the raw matter of war into photographic art. It is this mixed spirit of bravery and empathy that Winslet conveys in her foreword – a contradictory spirit that defines the characters of so many great artists. And now this book, in the flick of a hundred pages, conveys the breadth, quality and consistent complexity of this extraordinary woman behind the Rolleiflex lens.
‘Lee Miller’ runs at Tate Britain from until 15 Feb 2026. For more information, visit tate.org.uk.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox.
