Now a major exhibition at Tate Britain will explore the sheer breadth of the former Hampstead residents’ life and career.
Running from October 2 at the Millbank gallery, Lee Miller is the most extensive look back at the American’s extraordinary career to date – featuring 230 vintage and modern prints including images not previously seen in public.
Curators say the show will celebrate both Miller’s poetic vision and fearless spirit which included capturing images of the devastation of war, from the London Blitz to the horrors of Buchenwald.
David E. Scherman dressed for war. London 1942. (Image: Lee Miller Archives) The New Yorker was first a sought-after model in the late 1920s photographed by the likes of Cecil Beaton.
She moved to Paris in 1929 to work with surrealist Man Ray, becoming his lover, student, collaborator and muse while counting Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau among her friends.
By 1932 she had left Man Ray and was firmly behind the lens, establishing a commercial and portrait studio on New York and becoming a leading figure in the avant garde.
But in 1937 she met British surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose at a party in Paris and the pair moved to Downshire Hill, Hampstead where they were at the centre of a group of cutting edge artists.
At the outbreak of war, Miller became a photojournalist for Vogue, covering the London Blitz and the home front, including nurses, female pilots and the iconic ‘Fire Masks’ taken of the air raid shelter in their garden at Downshire Hill.
She teamed up with Life Magazine correspondent David E Scherman, who took the iconic and staged photograph of Miller in Hitler’s bath in Munich – the mud from their morning visit to Dacchau still on a pair of boots next to the tub.
But photographing dying children, the corpses of Nazis and their victims and the execution of former Hungarian Prime Minister Laszlo Bardossy took their toll when she returned to Britain.
Although Miller continued to work for Vogue for two years photographing, fashion, celebrities and travel assignments she discovered she was pregnant with her son Antony in 1947, married Penrose and moved to a farmhouse in East Sussex.
There they entertained the likes of Picasso, Man Ray and Henry Moore and Miller hung up her camera and became a gourmet cook, but suffered from PTSD, depression and alcoholism.
Lee Miller died of lung cancer in 1977 at the age of 70 and it was Antony’s discovery of 60,000 negatives, documents, journals, cameras, love letters, and souvenirs in the farm’s attic after her death that made him determined to ensure his mother was not forgotten.
He founded the Lee Miller Archives of her work, published a biography and collaborates with the many exhibitions of her work.
The Tate’s retrospective also includes archival material and artefacts that chart Miller’s participation in French surrealism, war reportage, images of Paris, Cairo and Syria as well as portraits of artists, writers and actors including Charlie Chaplin and Leonora Carrington.
Her final portraits were of the visitors to Farley Farmhouse in the 1950s and a vivid selfie, captured in Oskar Kokoschka’s studio in Finchley Road, St John’s Wood.
Curators hope to show how Miller’s innovative and fearless approach pushed the boundaries of photography, producing some of the most iconic images of the era.
Lee Miller runs at Tate Britain from October 2 until February 2026. www.tate.org.uk
