Lee Miller was a very beautiful woman. This sensational retrospective begins with images of her as a model in her early twenties and she is gloriously photogenic. But it didn’t take long for her to grow weary of being the focus of images and to start taking her own photographs.
I’m always drawn to a collage, of course! And this work, centre, is fabulous mingling of cutout paper and photographs featuring the surrealist painter Eileen Agar. Lee Miller became friends with many of the surrealist painters, spending time with them in Paris and the South of France.
But it’s her work as a War Correspondent in Europe during the Second World War which is so very moving and affecting. She bravely picked her way through war-torn streets, capturing the images of displaced people, injured fighters, hungry children and ruined buildings. She sent her photographs back to Vogue magazine (for whom she worked) but they found many of her images too brutal to publish.
Here’s the uniform she wore and her camera.
The images we were not allowed to photograph at the press preview include the famous shot of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath in his former apartment in Munich. With her associate, David E. Sherman, they entered his private bathroom after taking pictures of the horrors of Dachau.
So many of the photographs emit a palpable atmosphere which speaks of the time the pictures were taken but also convey Lee Miller’s barely-bottled anger at the places she was seeing, the people she met and the dreadful cruelty that had been inflicted on victims from the concentration camps.
Above is a photograph of Lee Miller’s son, Antony Penrose and Pablo Picasso. Antony knew very little of his mother’s extraordinary past. After her death he uncovered huge boxes of photographs stuffed into the attic of the family home at Farley Farm in Sussex. It is this astonishing archive we are able to see at the exhibition.
The show is on at Tate Britain until 15th February 2026.
Paper Places 