In art and in life, the American photographer Lee Miller (1907-77) was a free spirit. A key figure in the Surrealist movement, her trailblazing work slipped between art, fashion and reportage. She was the original model-turned-photographer, working for Condé Nast on both sides of the lens, posing regularly for Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene before deciding she “would rather take a picture than be one”, according to one of the many legends that cling to her memory.
Miller sought out Man Ray in Paris to be her mentor and they became lovers and collaborators. She was a muse to Pablo Picasso, and appeared in Jean Cocteau’s classic of avant-garde cinema, The Blood of a Poet (1930). She lived in New York, Paris, London and Cairo before putting down roots in East Sussex with her second husband, the artist Roland Penrose. But not before becoming one of the first female war correspondents, capturing the liberation of Paris and the horrors of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. At the end of the war in Europe, she famously staged a photograph of herself in Adolf Hitler’s bath.
Miller’s 1941 image of model Elizabeth Cowell, set against the backdrop of a bombed-out London © Lee Miller Archives
Colourful bits
It is therefore impossible to separate Miller’s life from her work, but has her mythology overshadowed her status as an artist? That is one of the key questions that the curator Hilary Floe had at the forefront of her mind when putting together Tate Britain’s survey of the artist, which opens this month. “For a long, long time, what has been picked up on are the most colourful bits: her lovers, being painted by Picasso,” Floe says. “Hopefully, there is now an appetite for a story that doesn’t get overshadowed by the fact that she was beautiful and very close to very important male artists. Because, as true as that is, it doesn’t matter that much.”
Floe says that she and the curatorial team did not want to lose the spirit of adventure and self-determination that guided Miller’s art-making. But achieving a balance between her work and her backstory was part of the challenge in presenting the UK’s largest survey of a photographer who has been the subject of a dozen major institutional exhibitions over the past 12 years, not to mention a recent movie (Lee, 2023, starring Kate Winslet).
“We’re not trying to reduce her career to a husk by removing all biography. It’s just that we’re trying to focus on the biography that helps us understand the work, rather than getting into her personal life for no reason,” Floe says. “So, we asked ourselves, ‘Is this relevant to the work?’ We chose the most interesting work we could find, rather than choosing work to help illustrate some facet of her life story. It’s just about putting the emphasis on her professional life and how that was driven by this intelligence and determination and bravery, rather than by chance encounters with men.”
• Lee Miller, Tate Britain, London, 2 October-15 February 2026
