A major retrospective of photographer Lee Miller’s work will be displayed in London this coming fall. It will be one of the most extensive exhibits of her work ever shown and the largest ever in the UK.
Spanning the full breadth of Miller’s multifaceted practice, from her participation in French surrealism to her war reportage, the exhibition at Tate Britain will reveal how her innovative and fearless approach pushed the boundaries of photography, producing some of the most iconic images of the modern era.
Around 230 vintage and modern prints, including works on display for the first time, will be presented alongside unseen archival material and ephemera, illuminating the richness of her photographic legacy.
Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York State. She initially studied painting and stage design, but her time as a professional model inspired her to pursue photography.
Tate Britain’s exhibition will trace her journey from modeling in New York, where she was photographed by celebrated figures like Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen, to working behind the lens in Paris where she moved in 1929. There she began working with Man Ray, combining surrealist ideas with technical experimentation in a period of explosive creative exchange. Together they discovered solarization, in which reversed halo-like effects are created through exposure to light during processing. Alongside her work with Man Ray.
By the early 1930s, Miller was fully enmeshed within Paris’s avant-garde circles. Turning her lens to the city’s streets, she created a series of photographs capturing the surreal in the every day: an early example shows a web of semi-congealed tar oozing across the pavement towards a pair of anonymous feet.
Through crops, disorienting angles, and reflections, Miller reimagined familiar Parisian sights ranging from Notre Dame cathedral to a Guerlain shop window. Returning to New York in 1932, she set up Lee Miller Studios Inc. and opened her first solo exhibition.
In both the United States and Europe, Miller exhibited regularly alongside fellow pioneers of modern photography, and her work was published in numerous artistic journals and magazines. Moving to Cairo in 1934, she continued to use her camera as a tool of exploration.
Tate Britain will present her celebrated surrealist image of the Siwa Oasis Portrait of Space 1937, alongside depictions of contemporary Cairo, the Egyptian desert, and travels across rural Syria and Romania, some of which have never previously been exhibited. By this point in her career, Miller had a sprawling transnational network of friends, and the show will present her playful portraits of artists, writers, actors, and filmmakers, including Charlie Chaplin and Leonora Carrington.
Miller moved to London in 1939 at the outbreak of war and quickly became a leading fashion photographer for British Vogue. Presented alongside original magazines and archival material, the exhibition will showcase her inventive body of work made in Blitz-torn London.
Miller went on to become one of the few accredited female war correspondents, documenting not only women’s contributions on the home front but also harrowing scenes from the front line, as well as the devastation and deprivation in post-liberation communities across France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Hungary and Romania.
Presented in dialogue with extracts from her vivid first-person essays, published in British and American Vogue, these photographs probe the brutal realities of war and its aftermath. The show will also include the portraits of Miller and David E. Scherman in Hitler’s private bath in April 1945. A radical performative gesture staged directly after the pair returned from photographing the Dachau concentration camp, these are considered to be some of the most extraordinary images of the 20th century.
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