The unflinching, surreal gaze of the US artist and war photographer Lee Miller bore witness to both beauty and brutality. Now she is the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Britain.
Lee Miller’s vision spirits us across place and time. At Tate Britain’s newly opened retrospective of Miller’s work, we see the intense intimacy and extraordinary range of her practice, spanning high fashion, avant-garde effects, surreal viewpoints and brutal war reportage. At 20, she was a Vogue cover star, embodying roaring-20s panache; she became apprentice and lover to legendary Paris-based artist Man Ray (with whom she pioneered the otherworldly solarisation photographic technique), then swiftly established her own place behind the camera and an independent studio. She would later quip: “I’d rather take a picture than be one”. By 1942, she was an accredited World War Two correspondent for the same glossy magazine she had originally modelled and shot designer outfits for.