Last night I went to see the play at Finsbury Park Theatre about that other Lee: Lee Krasner, the painter-wife of Jackson Pollock. The central theme was how Krasner, a talented artist, was sidelined by Pollock during his lifetime. No one could take seriously that a woman might be an accomplished Abstract Expressionist. Abstract Expressionism was for men. The American photographer, Lee Miller, similarly had to break through a glass ceiling in a predominantly man’s world, continually reinventing herself from fashion model – photographed by the likes of Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton – to became one of the very few accredited female war photographers of the Second World War, and among the first to document the horrors of Dachau, which she brought back to a disbelieving world on the unlikely pages of British and American Vogue.
Born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, where her father was a keen amateur photographer, Lee initially studied painting and stage design. However, with her natural flair and androgynous good looks that exemplified the beauty ideals of the time, she soon found herself modelling. A strip of four photographs at the beginning of the Tate exhibition, snapped in one of New York’s first automated photo booths, shows a gamine girl in a cloche hat. The same cloche hat she wore for her debut on the cover of Vogue in March 1927. Legend has it that Condé Montrose Nast discovered her as a 19-year-old on a New York sidewalk, where he was immediately captivated by her boyish beauty. Her developing interest in photography led her to move from being a model and muse in front of the camera to becoming a powerful, independent creative force behind the lens.
Lee Miller had an instinct for finding the pulse of things. A move to Paris in 1929 saw her become assistant, collaborator and sometime lover to Man Ray. Presenting herself at his studio unannounced, she declared she was his new student. He answered that he didn’t take students, and anyway, he was about to go on holiday. Okay, she said, she would go with him. Man Ray had a profound effect on how she saw the world, leading to her uncanny landscapes and sideways looks at both people and things. Although never formally aligned with any art movement, she was always open to new techniques, fearless and determined. ‘It was a matter, ’ she said, ‘of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.’
This triumphant exhibition loosely charts her development through five decades, navigating her involvement in the glittering avant-garde circles of pre-war Paris, through to her gritty wartime photorealism. What comes across is the development of a brilliant, sassy, vulnerable and indomitable woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The outbreak of the Second World War found her living in London after two years in Cairo with her then-wealthy Egyptian husband, whom she left, along with the increasing boredom she experienced there, for the critic, collector, and British Surrealist Roland Penrose. The images from Egypt, torn screens and shrouded statues, are framed and cropped to give everyday objects an unexpected, surreal feel. Many are shown here for the first time. A summer spent in Cornwall with Penrose led to a ‘sudden Surrealist invasion’ when they were joined by Man Ray, Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch. Lee seemed to have a gift for knowing anybody who was anybody, including Charlie Chaplin, Leonora Carrington and Eileen Agar.
A move to London in 1939 at the outbreak of war saw her become the premier fashion photographer for British Vogue, having previously run her own studio in New York. Her striking, observant photographs of the Blitz-torn city include a bomb damaged Dolphin Square and a non-conformist chapel where the rubble from a recent hit appears to be vomited out of the doorway’s classical dimensions.
She went on not only to document women’s lives on the home front, but also to capture the deprivation and devastation in post-war communities across Europe. French women accused of collaboration, shamed by having their heads publicly shaved, and the evacuation of hospitals in Normandy. One hideously wounded young soldier bandaged from head to toe, like the invisible man, asked her to take his photograph so he could see ‘how funny he looked.’ She never flinched. Never turned away. Perhaps her most famous photograph is that taken with David E. Scherman. She is sitting naked in Hitler’s bath. It is shown, here, in ironic juxtaposition to the revealed horrors of the Dachau concentration camp, that it was gruelling and emotionally demanding work. She wrote to Penrose of her encounters with Germans, ‘I’m becoming hard and hateful.’ In American Vogue, a magazine more accustomed to models on catwalks than gritty photorealism, she published two pairs of startling photographs under the titles:‘ German children, well-fed, healthy….burned bones of starved prisoners,’ and ‘Orderly villages, patterned quiet ….orderly furnaces to burn bodies.’
Entering Buchenwald concentration camp, just days after it was liberated, she was to discover that it had not been run by Übermensch but by ordinary men turned into sadists and monsters. A beaten SS guard shows on a peasant-like face, bloodied and filthy after a beating. You can feel her revulsion alongside the compassion. Among the most searing images are those of a group of prisoners standing broken and blank by a pile of charred human remains. They stare straight into her lens, all life sucked out of them. These would be published in American Vogue in June 1945 under the title ‘Believe It’. What she saw would haunt her for the rest of her life. History and the world owe her a debt for never flinching, for establishing the unvarnished truth.
In 1947, she married Roland Penrose. After the war, she remained extremely private about her war work, which was hidden away in the attic of the Sussex farmhouse, Farleys, only to be discovered after her death. Throughout the 1950s, she continued to write for Vogue and photograph guests, including Picasso, Man Ray, and Max Ernst, who frequently visited. Farleys gave her a chance to heal and distract herself with new projects. Cookery became an escape. She took an advanced Cordon Bleu course and lost herself in producing ever-more surreal meals such as ‘cauliflower breasts’ doused in pink mayonnaise. But the war and what she had seen stayed with her. She had PTSD and became dependent on alcohol; all the while trying to work, renovate the crumbling farmhouse and look after young children.
Her son, Anthony Penrose, is brutally honest about his relationship with his mother. ‘We hated each other when I was a teenager.’ At the time, no one was really aware of the trauma that she underwent, witnessing the horrors of the camps. It was only after she was dead and he was doing research for the film Lee, starring Kate Winslet, that he began to feel emotionally connected to his ‘difficult’ and often drunk mother, to understand her. Possibly, she never really healed. This once beautiful socialite had seen too much, witnessed too many unspeakable horrors, and became a primary witness to the 20th century’s most brutal events. It is thanks to her indomitable courage, to the legacy she left, that those who would deny the horrors of war, particularly the holocaust, will constantly be confronted with the unvarnished reality she fearlessly brought back.
Lee Miller, Tate Britain, 2 October 2025 – 15 February 2026, £20
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic. Her latest novel Flatlands from Puskin and Mercure de France was on the Sunday Times best historical fiction list. Her latest poetry collection is Swimming to Albania from Salmon Poetry.
www.suehubbard.com