One of the first images in Tate Britain’s Lee Miller retrospective is deceptively unassuming: a 1931 photograph of two birdcages on a windowsill. A vase of flowers sits amid patterned ironwork, the bars of the birdcages mirrored in the grille over the window. At first glance, the photo seems domestic, decorative even – a far cry from the surrealist experiments or wartime reportage that would later define Miller’s career.

Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller was born in 1907 in New York. Her first encounters with photography were as a subject: her father, a keen amateur, had her pose from childhood, often nude. Carolyn Burke, Miller’s biographer, takes great care to clarify that this amounted to nothing more sinister than parental eccentricity, and that Miller’s mother sanctioned the whole business on the grounds that it qualified as ‘art’.

By 1926, Miller had moved on to professional modelling while studying painting at the Art Students League. During this period she was photographed by Cecil Beaton, Edward Steichen, and Arnold Genthe, one of the city’s more fashionable portraitists. She soon appeared on the covers of British and American Vogue in March 1927, furs set against a city skyline: already the quintessential modern woman.

The image coincided with a broader rewrite of feminism – during what Burke rather primly calls ‘a redistribution of sexual energies’. The battle for suffrage and legal rights was already underway, but the new ambition was to share in men’s freedoms and daily lives. For Miller, this new womanhood announced itself in androgyny. Tall, slender, and shorn of hair, she looked like the blueprint flapper; later, she’d double down on the boyishness by dropping the fussy ‘Elizabeth’ in favour of the brisk, unisex ‘Lee’ for modelling. Though it was only an emergent profession by the 1920s, she quickly became one of its first stars. Those early lessons – on both sides of the lens – set the terms for her later work; as she would eventually claim, she preferred ‘to take a picture than be one’.

In her early twenties, Miller laid the groundwork for her artistic career with seven months of study at Ladislas Medgyes’ School of Stagecraft in Paris, where she focused on lighting, costume, and design. This immersion in theatre would later echo through her artistic choices. She returned to Paris in 1929, at the age of 22, and by chance encountered the Surrealist photographer Man Ray, 17 years her senior, in a café. What began as a professional collaboration quickly evolved into an affair, with Miller his assistant, pupil, and lover. While she was equally a co-inventor of Surrealism’s photographic idiom, history has overwhelmingly credited him alone – especially for the technique of solarisation, which involves exposing a partially developed photograph to light to give it an otherworldly feel. The room devoted to their joint work from 1929 to 1932 overflows with imagery at once sumptuous and disturbing: dreamscapes of torsos, necks, and breasts, exploring erotic fantasy through themes of subservience and power.

Their affair grew increasingly fraught in 1931, when Miller became involved with a wealthy Egyptian, Aziz Eloui Bey. At the time, Bey was married to Nimet, a celebrated model who had posed for both Man Ray and, coincidentally, Miller herself. The affair descended into tragedy: Nimet took her own life, and Man Ray reacted in despair, photographing himself with a pistol and a rope around his neck. By the end of 1932, Miller left Paris for the United States, where she launched her own portrait-photography studio alongside her brother Erik, and married Bey in 1934 at the Egyptian Consulate before relocating to Cairo later that year.

The city offered her a new context, exposing her to a different sense of light and space, as well as social hierarchies, while her earlier Parisian networks and Surrealist sensibilities continued to influence her work. But Miller soon found the British expatriates in Cairo – ‘the black satin and pearls set’, as she called them – insufferably tedious. She longed for the liberal arts world of Paris and, eventually, her husband permitted her to depart with Surrealist artist and curator Roland Penrose. They married and made their home in a quiet corner of East Sussex.

Miller had, over the years, accrued a sprawling transnational network of artists, writers, actors, and filmmaker friends – and she used their experimental approaches to her advantage, pushing the boundaries of her own work. She turned the movement’s shock tactics into feminist (though she refused the term at the time, preferring to be known simply as a Surrealist) explorations of eroticism, mortality, and control, splicing the female body into part-objects and incorporating everyday materials, props, and urban detritus to challenge perceptions of space. Masks, decrepit buildings, and hands recur across her compositions – the latter, on one occasion, probing an inflated condom. Some of her photos reveal a distinctly morbid curiosity; for instance, two early images show a severed breast – sourced from a Parisian medical school where she documented a mastectomy – resting on a dinner plate like a slab of meat. A Tate placard situates these works historically, noting Europe’s loosening sexual mores alongside Nazi attacks on cultural freedom, of which Miller was keenly aware. In 1940, Miller wrote to her brother, ‘I’d fight on a barricade so that they could continue painting so-called “degenerate art”.’

By the early 1940s, Miller had settled in London, Penrose’s home city, and had become Vogue’s leading photographer. As an American citizen, she was barred from official war work, but she combined her fashion photography with early work as a war correspondent. Even as the Blitz tore through the city, Miller remained in London, refusing a return to the safety of the United States. Rationing shaped her approach to fashion: shadows altered the shape of garments, solarisation and double exposure made fabrics appear unfamiliar, and objects such as masks or inflatable fish occasionally appeared in the frame.

By 1944, Miller was working as a US Army-accredited correspondent, following Allied forces across the Continent and photographing the impact of war: skies filled with smoke, makeshift medical stations in muddy fields, and buildings shattered by bombing. When she reached Buchenwald and Dachau shortly after their liberation in 1945, the euphoria quickly gave way to a sobering reckoning. Miller’s photographs record the aftermath with a steady, unsentimental eye, but it is her concentration camp images that are the most harrowing. One, for example, shows the battered face of an SS guard, beaten by his former prisoners. Contra her self-portrait in Hitler’s bathtub, taken the day he committed suicide, these photographs offer no sense of triumph or retribution – only a direct, unmediated confrontation with atrocity.

When Miller returned to Vogue after the war, working there until 1953, she gradually lost interest in fashion and, eventually, photography. The Tate’s final room is filled with portraits of her famous friends – Henry Moore hugging his sculpture in East Sussex, Dylan Thomas lounging in the Vogue studio – but these images bear little resemblance to her earlier work, and there is nothing technically spectacular about them.

The war had taken an immense toll on Miller’s mental health, leaving her with PTSD and an increasing reliance on alcohol, and she found solace in other pursuits, such as gourmet cooking. By the time of her death in 1977, much of her archive had been tucked away in an attic. Hiding this body of work was, in part, her way of leaving the past behind.

Her son, Antony Penrose, recalled that whenever Miller was asked about her life as a war correspondent for Vogue, she would dismiss it and claim that her work had been destroyed. ‘I had no idea about her life outside of our home and being my often very frustrating mother,’ Penrose told the New York Times. Discovering the archive after her death, he ‘felt this immense sense of grief that she had a whole other existence I knew nothing about. And now it was too late’.

Lee Miller is at Tate Britain until 15 February 2026.