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A major exhibition of the surrealist photographer Lee Miller, reviewed by Stephen Cragg KC
Tate Britain’s massive exhibition following the life and work of Lee Miller reveals one of the most remarkable women of the 20th century.
It is hard to believe that one life could encompass so much. Miller started as a photographic model in New York, before essentially blagging a job as Man Ray’s assistant in France in the 1930s. She hung out with and photographed the surrealists and spent so much time with Picasso that he was her most photographed subject. She married an Egyptian man and her pictures of the middle-eastern barren landscapes in the late 1930s show a sensitivity to light, form and culture.
She then became a fashion photographer for Vogue magazine, morphed into a photographer of the Blitz in London (with both a surrealist and a fashionista eye) and then, incredibly, became a war photographer and correspondent as the Allies made their way across Europe in 1945. All these parts of her life are painstakingly documented in the exhibition, but the culmination of the show is Miller’s haunting images from the liberation of Europe. She was one of the first journalists into the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau, and photographs from these sites confront viewers with the horror of Nazi atrocities. There is nothing sanitised about these works; we see the deprivation and the suffering that Miller saw.
She was then photographed in Hitler’s bath in his Munich apartment, her still muddy Dachau boots visible and a portrait of the Führer on the bath edge – a deliberate violation of the Führer’s privacy, displayed with grim defiance and dark humour.
No wonder this exhibition was packed on a Sunday afternoon, leading to one of the downsides to the show: many of the 250 photographs on show are small, black and white prints and were difficult to get close to – go on a Monday morning if you can!
It has been said that those who recorded the horrors of the concentration camps were not able to take on board the weight of what they saw, and this may have been the case for Miller – she spent the later years of her life after the war avoiding commissions and becoming almost a recluse, perhaps giving an insight to her own observation that her success was based on ‘getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you’.
Miller achieved what might well be impossible to do in the 21st century of specialisms, reinventing herself every few years as something new in photography, journalism, art and lifestyle, with the camera as the constant to interrogate and challenge the world.
At Tate Britain until 15 February 2026
Tate Britain’s massive exhibition following the life and work of Lee Miller reveals one of the most remarkable women of the 20th century.
It is hard to believe that one life could encompass so much. Miller started as a photographic model in New York, before essentially blagging a job as Man Ray’s assistant in France in the 1930s. She hung out with and photographed the surrealists and spent so much time with Picasso that he was her most photographed subject. She married an Egyptian man and her pictures of the middle-eastern barren landscapes in the late 1930s show a sensitivity to light, form and culture.
She then became a fashion photographer for Vogue magazine, morphed into a photographer of the Blitz in London (with both a surrealist and a fashionista eye) and then, incredibly, became a war photographer and correspondent as the Allies made their way across Europe in 1945. All these parts of her life are painstakingly documented in the exhibition, but the culmination of the show is Miller’s haunting images from the liberation of Europe. She was one of the first journalists into the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau, and photographs from these sites confront viewers with the horror of Nazi atrocities. There is nothing sanitised about these works; we see the deprivation and the suffering that Miller saw.
She was then photographed in Hitler’s bath in his Munich apartment, her still muddy Dachau boots visible and a portrait of the Führer on the bath edge – a deliberate violation of the Führer’s privacy, displayed with grim defiance and dark humour.
No wonder this exhibition was packed on a Sunday afternoon, leading to one of the downsides to the show: many of the 250 photographs on show are small, black and white prints and were difficult to get close to – go on a Monday morning if you can!
It has been said that those who recorded the horrors of the concentration camps were not able to take on board the weight of what they saw, and this may have been the case for Miller – she spent the later years of her life after the war avoiding commissions and becoming almost a recluse, perhaps giving an insight to her own observation that her success was based on ‘getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you’.
Miller achieved what might well be impossible to do in the 21st century of specialisms, reinventing herself every few years as something new in photography, journalism, art and lifestyle, with the camera as the constant to interrogate and challenge the world.
At Tate Britain until 15 February 2026
A major exhibition of the surrealist photographer Lee Miller, reviewed by Stephen Cragg KC
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