The unflinching, surreal gaze of the US artist and war photographer Lee Miller bore witness to both beauty and brutality. Now she is the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Britain.

Lee Miller's vision spirits us across place and time. At Tate Britain's newly opened retrospective of Miller's work, we see the intense intimacy and extraordinary range of her practice, spanning high fashion, avant-garde effects, surreal viewpoints and brutal war reportage. At 20, she was a Vogue cover star, embodying roaring-20s panache; she became apprentice and lover to legendary Paris-based artist Man Ray (with whom she pioneered the otherworldly solarisation photographic technique), then swiftly established her own place behind the camera and an independent studio. She would later quip: "I'd rather take a picture than be one". By 1942, she was an accredited World War Two correspondent for the same glossy magazine she had originally modelled and shot designer outfits for.

Miller's images appear to code-switch and slip between boundaries – so sleekly, in fact, that their scope remains startling. Major international exhibitions – at Tate Britain and, from next month, at Vancouver's Polygon Gallery – as well as books and screen releases (notably the 2023 biopic Lee, starring Kate Winslet in the title role) reflect a modern mainstream reawakening to Miller. They also highlight a growing realisation: that she was, arguably, the most fearless photographer of the 20th Century.

Tate exhibition curator Hilary Floe spent three years immersed in Miller's work for this show. She tells the BBC: "What unites these vast and sprawling bodies of work that [Miller] creates? These three words kept haunting me: fearless, poetic, and surreal."

Those qualities are powerfully evident in Miller's photography World War Two photography; as a woman correspondent, she was restricted from frontline coverage – yet rather than limiting her perspective, she captured details that were urgent, eloquent and uncomfortably close. She found sharp allegories for violence (for instance, a shattered "Remington Silent" typewriter on bombed building remains). She photographed the German concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald post liberation, starkly depicting both victims and perpetrators; in one shot, we are brought eye-to-eye with a beaten SS guard, his features dazzled by Miller's camera flash.

"She became a war correspondent because she felt that bearing witness was incredibly important," says Floe. "And in doing so, she looked at things that affected her for the rest of her life. It's not that she was the only person in the camps, but she created very powerful images there with a very particular construction and intelligence behind them."

Some of Miller's wartime images are surreally stylish: her close friend and fellow photojournalist David Scherman poses in a gas mask standing behind his own camera (Miller and Scherman would also photograph one another bathing in Hitler's house, on the day of the Fuhrer's death); there is a weirdly futuristic chic to the two young women wearing fire masks in Blitz-era London. But Miller was also unafraid to capture the messy, troubling fall-out of life after liberation. The Tate exhibition includes another unforgettable portrait (unpublished at its time) of a young woman accused of being a Nazi collaborator, her head roughly shaven, her........

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