Lee Miller at Tate is phenomenal

timeless travels
13 hours ago
5 min read

by Theresa Thompson, Timeless Travels' Art Correspondent

Lee Miller, David E. Scherman dressed for war, London 1942. Lee Miller Archives.

A trip to Tate Britain on Millbank in London turned my thinking on its head. I’d intended to write this as a review of a trio of newly opened Tate exhibitions in London with two at Tate Modern, but, having seen the riveting Lee Miller exhibition at Tate Britain, I just have to lead with that. I’ll get to the drama of the Picasso Theatre exhibition and the energy and eclecticism of Nigerian Modernism in a bit.

Lee Miller at Tate Britain is the most extensive retrospective of her photography yet staged in the UK - and it is a phenomenal show.

It takes you from Miller (born 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York State) working in front of the camera from childhood on - her amateur photographer father sometimes used her as a model, sometimes nude, from the age of seven - “I was practically born and brought up in a dark room” Miller is quoted in the opening gallery - to becoming one of the most sought-after professional models of the late 1920s, initially with American Vogue, she soon switched to working behind the lens. A move to Paris in 1929 had her becoming a leading figure in avant-garde circles, and the beginnings of working with Man Ray. It was a creatively fertile period combining surrealism and experimentation with new processes.

Her surrealist eye fully awakened, she turned her lens to the city’s streets, creating a series of photographs capturing the surreal in the everyday. One arresting work from this period is that of a web of congealing tar oozing across a pavement towards a pair of feet. In the gallery Tate titles as Dreaming of Eros, another arresting but also sublime work is Man Ray and Miller’s 1929 print, Neck, tightly cropped around a graceful curving throat (Miller’s). Fascinated by the erotic of the body, each performed for the other’s lens, and for their own.

In the early 1930s, photography was still not widely recognised as an art form, but images like these on show here aided acceptance. After a couple of galleries alive with bold, witty or suggestive works, the show moves on in its coverage of Miller’s daring and multifaceted practice to a new chapter of her life: her travels, initially to Egypt (Cairo) in 1934, having married an Egyptian businessman. At first, with no need to earn a living, she renounced photography but a trip to Jerusalem in 1935 reignited her creative spark.

Her adventurous spirit resurfaced. Cue some wonderfully enigmatic shots as over the next four years she made expeditions across remote Egyptian deserts as well as to Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus, Romania and Greece. Guided by her eye for arresting silhouettes, beguiling juxtapositions - as well as double meanings - industrial modernity shoulder to shoulder with timeless scenery or ruined antiquity – this section is a joy. It’s a joy, however, mixed with regret; there is Palmyra c.1938, the ancient city as it shall never be seen again.

Here, too, is her renowned Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb, near Siwa, 1937. Taken through the veil of a ripped fly screen stretched across a window in a remote traveller’s rest stop on a journey in Egypt’s Western Desert, this unforgettable image captures the empty sprawling landscape like no other.

In 1939, leaving behind her life in Egypt, she joined the surrealist artist Roland Penrose in London. It was just before the outbreak of war. As a US citizen she was ineligible for war work in the UK, so instead quickly became a leading fashion photographer for British Vogue. This led to her famed war reportage.

Lee Miller, Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb near Siwa 1937. Lee Miller Archives.

Although working with increasingly limited resources, her inventiveness was not to be stifled. Creative imagination kicked in. Aided by her surrealist eye. Pictures from Blitz-era London include that of a model wearing a stylish suit, standing under an archway, apparently untouched by the scene of bombed-out London behind her; two young women wearing fire masks and eye shields crouching at an air-raid shelter entrance; and You will not lunch in Charlotte Street today, 1940, its title reflecting the pathos and absurdity of wartime.

By 1942, Miller was an accredited war correspondent for the magazine, one of the few accredited female war correspondents. But, like other women journalists, she faced barriers to frontline coverage – yet, again, she did not let that limit her, instead documenting not only women’s contributions on the home front, and harrowing scenes of field hospitals, but also the devastation and deprivation of post-liberation communities.

It was only in summer 1944 – after D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France – that she was finally allowed close to battle. Miller’s often unflinching war coverage was prolific, but much of it remained unpublished in her lifetime.

One notable example shows a group of civilian refugees, released from Saint-Malo’s historic fortress during a temporary truce, herded, carrying what they could. Miller describes seeing ‘the injured and ill first – then old women, with bundles and dazed eyes, little hand-holding groups of girls, stumbling along – couples with babies, prams piled with all they had saved of their possessions, boys, men stumbling from shock – prim, snotty women, nuns in immaculate white’. The rare large-format print was kept in the Vogue archive and has never been exhibited before.

Moving, powerful images. Sometimes, hard to take, our reactions sharpened by today’s incessant news coverage of wars and international tensions. In gallery number nine, entitled ‘Believe it’, photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, taken soon after they had been liberated in April 1945, together with a few contact sheets in a vitrine, tell their horrific tale. The images are deliberately displayed in a separate room.

Lee Miller, Model Elizabeth Cowell wearing Digby Morton suit, London 1941. Lee Miller Archives

The astonishing portraits of Miller and fellow photojournalist David Scherman in Hitler’s private bathtub in April 1945, staged images with every detail arranged for symbolic meaning, are also in this gallery. Says Tate, a “radical performative gesture staged directly after the pair returned from photographing the Dachau concentration camp… these are considered to be some of the most extraordinary images of the 20th century.”

This is a huge show. It is powerful and judiciously put together. I was in there over two hours, utterly absorbed. With around 230 vintage and modern prints, some displayed for the first time, and the archival material, magazine pages and ephemera, the exhibition presents a picture of an extraordinary woman, audacious and inventive, a woman of astonishing panache and abilities.

Like many, I had seen the film, Lee when it came out earlier this year. The film, a biographical drama covering her years as a correspondent for Vogue during WWII and based on the true story, was a good watch. It prompted me to read more about her. And now, the opportunity to see for real Lee Miller’s sometimes poignant, compassionate, sometimes unflinching, witty, surrealistic photographs was unmissable.

It is proving very popular so book ahead, if possible.

Lee Miller

Tate Britain

Showing until: 15 February 2026

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/lee-miller

Note:

If you’re planning a trip to both galleries on the same day, an option is to travel on the Thames using the Tate Boat between the sites.

See: https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-boat