Lee Miller, Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb near Siwa, 1937. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

Fifty years after her death, Lee Miller is having a moment. Last year, Lee, a biopic of Miller starring Kate Winslet, was released in cinemas, with several biographies reissued to accompany the film. Indeed, Miller’s is a life worth telling. She was a model for some of the leading Surrealist photographers in Paris in the twenties, before picking up a camera and discovering she could take better pictures herself. She traveled the Middle East: Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon. She photographed the Blitz and other key moments of the Second World War for Vogue. She was among the first photographers to discover the atrocities of the Holocaust. She famously posed in Hitler’s bathtub, a framed portrait of the recently deceased Führer propped behind her head, her muddy boots, still caked with the dirt of Dachau, tossed on the floor. This photographic act of defiance and daring was emblematic of Miller’s temerity. If any one person could sum up the 20th century and its innovations, its absurdities, its beauty and its horror, it may well be Lee Miller.

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Those in London shouldn’t miss the chance to see Miller’s photographs at Tate Britain. Closing soon, “Lee Miller” is the biggest exhibition dedicated solely to Miller ever mounted in the U.K. and takes a broadly chronological approach to its subject. Before we are introduced to Miller’s own photographic corpus, we see her as framed by some of the leading photographers of the time, including Cecil Beaton, Arnold Genthe and Edward Steichen. Those familiar with Miller’s war photography will find her posing for sanitary products........

© Observer