By James Brewer
Jaunty in a felt ‘sports hat’ and a tweed coat, fashion model Lee Miller in Paris one day in September 1930 reversed her usual role by turning the camera on herself. Published in American Vogue, the result clinched what was to be a new vocation for her. She had previously appeared showing the latest clothes in the pages of American, British, French and German editions of the magazine, but this was the first time she was the published photographer.
Fifteen years later, she would be photographed in quite different garb – or lack of it – in one of the most sensational photos of World War II. She was snapped sitting naked in Hitler’s bathtub in his private apartment in Munich, while working as a war correspondent for Vogue. Lee had entered the building together with American soldiers and a friend, a seasoned male photographer. By coincidence on the same day the Führer committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin.
The picture of bathtime bravado was taken by the other photographer, David E Scherman of Life magazine, and in turn she took a picture of him soaking off the dirt of working under grim conditions. They put a portrait of Hitler on the edge of the tub and a statuette of a naked woman nearby. Lee’s boots, caked in mud after a traumatic day seeing a liberated death camp, are on the otherwise clean mat. In the tub, Lee scrubs her shoulder. The mocking scenes were to send a message to Germany and far beyond that “The Führer is dead. And now we [i.e. the Allies] are here.”
In between these junctures in her abundantly varied existence, when Lee’s beauty was the toast of peacetime bohemian Paris, her seductive lips had been immortalised in one of the greatest Surrealist paintings of the 1930s. Bursts of high-octane admiration and reverence for her talent and charisma continue to this day. As recently as 2024, she was played by Kate Winslet in a hard-hitting movie simply entitled Lee.
Lee Miller’s can-do and unflinching approach to life, forging her own way as she went along, is celebrated in a sustained, absorbing account by Tate Britain – the largest retrospective of the lady ever presented. On show until February 15, 2026, Lee Miller charts her rise as an alluring fashion model, then a woman with an infallible eye behind the lens, on to her involvement in French surrealism, her skills as an accomplished writer, and her searing reportage of war in Europe.
She took some of the most telling images of the modern era. The privately-run Lee Miller Archives has strictly copyrighted the images it holds, so the central character scarcely appears in what we are reproducing in this article. Take our word for it, the 230 vintage and modern prints on exhibit at Tate are stunning and moving, by turns, and of immense historic value. More than 4,400 of her pictures can be viewed and bought via leemiller.co.uk or through exhibitions at her house-museum in Sussex.
Born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, a commercial city 120 km north of New York, Lee studied painting and stage design, and as a professional model she was photographed by among others Edward Steichen, famed for his 1904 photo of The Flatiron skyscraper in New York, and Cecil Beaton, royal costume designer and portraitist, both pioneers of fashion photography.
The Tate exhibition releases for publication a strip of four photos of Lee, in apparel very much mid-1920s style, taken in an automated photo booth, a novelty that came to New York in 1925.
She moved to Paris in 1929, and there is a particularly striking photo of her in leisurewear gazing wistfully from a deckchair under an awning. Boldly presenting herself unannounced at the studio of the experimental visual artist Man Ray, she declared herself to be his new student. He retorted that he did not take students, and anyway, he was about to go on holiday. Okay, she said, she would go with him. They became fellow-workers and lovers.
Man Ray had a profound effect on her unconventional pictorial view of the world, leading her to create strange landscapes and take an oblique look at humankind, and she was ever open to new techniques. “It was a matter,”’ she said in her typically spirited parlance, “of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.” Man Ray in 1931 created Observatory Time – The Lovers, a famed oil painting based on a trope of Surrealists, that of the devouring woman. Lee’s super-reddened lips at dizzily giant scale and expressing a faint smile are floating high above the Paris astronomical facility. It is all seen as referring to the break-up of the couple and his continued desire for her.
Both blessed with an exceptional eye, Man Ray and Lee together developed solarisation, a method that reversed the negative and positive during photo processing, to generate halo-like outlines. Deeply involved in Paris avant-garde circles, Lee produced surrealist nude prints, and the London show has her playful portraits of artists, writers, actors and filmmakers, including Charlie Chaplin and Leonora Carrington. Among the artistic crowd were artists including Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Joan Miró, all captured by her camera. The beguiling Lee Miller inspired Picasso to paint at various points six portraits of her.
Jean Cocteau, as a Surrealist and rival of Man Ray, cast her in his first film, Le Sang d’un poète (1930–32; The Blood of a Poet) under her full name, Elizabeth Lee Miller. Extracts from the 50-minute film are shown in the exhibition. It explores the plight of the artist, and the relationship between art and dreams. An armless statue in the room of the poet comes to life and invites him to step through a mirror to discover bizarre places and characters.
Alongside her work with Man Ray, Lee joined French Vogue as an apprentice and set up a commercial photographic studio. Taking her lens to the city’s streets, and always technically assured, she made a series capturing the surreal in the everyday. Through cropping, disorienting angles and reflections, she reimagined sights ranging from Notre-Dame Cathedral to a Guerlain shop window.
Back in New York in 1932, she established Lee Miller Studios Inc and opened her first solo exhibition. She exhibited in the US and Europe, alongside other aces of the lens, and was published in artistic journals and magazines.
She left her wealthy Egyptian husband for the British critic, collector, and Surrealist Roland Penrose. In Egypt in 1934, she continued to make novel imagery, depicting Cairo and the Egyptian desert. We see her celebrated surrealist image Siwa Oasis Portrait of Space 1937, from a trip to a valley in western Egypt with a Berber-speaking population and with thousands of olive trees and date palms. It is said that the shape of the clouds in the oasis picture recalls her lips floating in the sky in Man Ray’s painting. A large hole in a fly screen frames the scene. Lee travelled through Syria and Romania, and Tate shows some her previously unexhibited photos.
Moving to London in 1939 at the outbreak of war, Lee quickly became a leading fashion photographer for British Vogue. The UK government saw women’s magazines as crucial to buoying morale in wartime. Under editor Audrey Withers Vogue encouraged women to enter the workforce and to accept clothing restrictions. Lee rallied to the cause, even promoting short haircuts, seen as a means of helping stem outbreaks of headlice among factory workers. When Vogue’s Bond Street offices were bombed in September 1940, the publication tenaciously declared: “Here is Vogue, in spite of all!” above Lee’s photographs of the damage. In the show is a picture, taken by David Scherman, of Lee smartly dressed and coiffed, pensively and perhaps nonchalantly sitting on a chair in the street outside the Vogue studio.
When German bombing cut off electricity to the studio, Lee moved outdoors for her fashion shoots. In 1941, she photographed two models wearing plain wartime fashions outside the bomb shelter in her Hampstead garden. Lee and Roland had painted the shelter, formerly a coal bunker, in pastel pink. The models wear masks made of rubber and tin used by wardens to protect against incendiary bombs. A variant of the photograph was published in an American Vogue story about the Blitz which proclaimed that “fire has no more ruthless adversaries than the women of Britain.”
The same year was published a dramatic photo of Elizabeth Cowell modelling a trendsetting suit, in front of a shattered London streetscape. Elizabeth (Betty) Cowell (1911-1998) was a broadcasting celebrity. On August 1, 1936 , she had become the first female BBC announcer, in a test transmission ahead of the launch of the corporation’s television service. In Lee’s picture, she is wearing a suit by the influential couturier Digby Morton (1906–1983), designed for the Utility Clothing Scheme, a government wartime initiative setting austerity standards of durable materials, limited features like pockets and seams, at affordable price.
A page spread from Vogue in August 1943, headed Dreaming of These, includes seven shots of perky new headgear, and a model (Lee?) admiring them dreamily. “Before the war, to go out without a hat was to go out half-dressed. That was our view, and we stuck to it. But new times bring new modes, and now, we agree, a lady who leaves her hat on the shelf is not necessarily a tramp,” runs the text. “In the country, in a restaurant at night, a sleek, short, prettily set head of hair, like the one on this page, looks pretty good without covering.”
Although on the front line of fashion, Lee felt frustrated so far from the military front. 1941 she wrote to her parents: “It seems pretty silly to carry on working on a frivolous paper like Vogue. Tho it may be good for the country’s morale it’s hell on mine.”
The exhibition conveys how she showed the impact of the Blitz on London. This includes a bomb-damaged Dolphin Square, a 1930s-built apartment block overlooking the Thames at Pimlico and home to many rich and powerful personalities. Works such as You will not lunch in Charlotte Street today from 1940 and Fire Masks the following year convey the twists of fortune of the capital in wartime.
After documenting what women were doing on the home front Lee achieved her wish and became one of the few accredited female war correspondents, formally attached to US forces. We see a reproduction of her US Army identity card from 1942, as a war correspondent for Vogue Studio. She took harrowing scenes from the battlefield, and of the devastation and deprivation in post-liberation France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Hungary and Romania.
Miller and Scherman were among the first journalists to photograph the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. Tate gives warning that some of the images from this era will shock: they were published in American Vogue though in June 1945 under the headline ‘Believe It’ Her editor Audrey Withers had become a close friend and advocate in getting her images of the Holocaust into what was mainly a fashion magazine.
Her photos included French women known as Les Tondues, their heads shaven for alleged collaboration with the enemy, and the evacuation of hospitals in Normandy.
After 1945, Lee remained in touch with her artist friends, making portraits of among others furniture designer and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi in New York; painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning in Arizona, and Henry Moore and Jean Dubuffet visiting Farley Farm, her home in Sussex. She married Roland Penrose in 1947 but unsurprisingly remained traumatised as a result of her disturbing experiences in the field and hid much of her war work in the attic. She continued to write for Vogue and photograph visitors including Picasso, Man Ray, and Max Ernst.
Was her immersion in the horrors of World War II worth it? One wonders whether she would have shared the views of another renowned champion of photographic actualité, Don McCullin. McCullin, who has covered dozens of conflicts, said in London soon after turning 90 years of age in 2025 that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine had left him with “no faith in humanity… I’m really ashamed that we haven’t achieved anything in the media. We haven’t changed anything. What have I been doing for the last 60 years? Totally wasting my time.”
The exhibition is organised by Tate Britain in collaboration with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. It is curated by Hilary Floe, Tate senior curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art, with Saskia Flower, assistant curator, and Michal Goldschmidt, former assistant curator.
Captions in detail:
Model Elizabeth Cowell wearing Digby Morton suit, London, 1941. Photo by Lee Miller. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
Tate Britain poster showing ‘Fire masks,’ London, 1941, Photo by Lee Miller. © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2025. All rights reserved leemiller.co.uk.
Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb near Siwa, 1937. Photo by Lee Miller. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
David E Scherman dressed for war, London, 1942. Photo by Lee Miller. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
Installation Photography of Lee Miller at Tate Britain.
Lee Miller, Tate Britain, runs until February 15, 2026.
