Lee Miller’s stellar career from model to photographer

‘I’d rather take a picture than be one,” Lee Miller once said. As a new exhibition at Tate Britain shows, she did both. She may best be remembered now as a surrealist-cum-war-photographer — a bizarre combination even by today’s outré standards — but her work in fashion, first as a model then as a photographer, is also a key part of her oeuvre.

Her earliest-known photographs, exhibited here for the first time, are a set of photobooth self-portraits taken in New York in 1927. In them she is dressed in the same cloche hat and fur stole that she wore on the illustrated cover of American Vogue by Georges Lepape in March that year.

Fashion was Miller’s way into photography. It was a letter of introduction from Edward Steichen, for whom she modelled, that got her an apprenticeship with Man Ray, with whom some of her most groundbreaking collaborations would take place. By 1930, Vogue was finding Steichen’s prices a bit de trop, so it asked George Hoyningen-Huene, another great of fashion photography, to train up some newbies. Perfect timing for Miller — although the fact that the magazine declared itself to be looking to hire “an artist and a gentleman” makes it clear that hers was not going to be a straightforward rise.

She knew how best to play her hand. Creative talent was among her cards, but so was beauty. Her first photograph for the magazine, published in 1933, was another self-portrait, the sharp diagonal of her jaw echoed by the ruching on her velvet wrap. Both photo and subject are take-your-breath-away stunning.

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Miller on a fashion assignment in Paris for Schiaparelli, 1945

©LEE MILLER ARCHIVES, ENGLAND 2025, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, LEEMILLER.CO.UK

Throughout the war, in which she was accredited to the US army, she combined her work in the field with photographing for British Vogue, or “Brogue” as it was brilliantly known at the time. “She lives a high-powered social life through every kind of Blitz and blackout,” wrote Audrey Withers, the magazine’s editor, “and has an enormous and very amusing circle of friends.” She could, as an American, as Withers points out, “easily have got home to comfort and safety”.

Hilary Floe, the curator of the Tate exhibition, says Miller’s work at Vogue rendered her “very knowledgeable” about fashion, and that she saw it “as part of a cosmopolitan world of beauty, freedom and creativity, and loved it for that”.

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She was shot in brands such as Schiaparelli and Patou, and had a wardrobe with a distinctly surrealist edge. An MI5 dossier on her dating from the 1940s and 1950s, when there were concerns she might be a Russian spy, referred to her as wearing “queer clothes”. She sported a silver knuckleduster as a pendant, painted her toenails blue-green and, working in mainland Europe in 1944-5, accessorised the American military uniform she had to wear with a looted Nazi flag reinvented as a scarf. Not that her uniform was normal either; she had had it made to measure on Savile Row.

Was it Miller’s gender or her beauty that meant her work wasn’t given its creative due until comparatively recently? Was she further damned by her ongoing involvement in fashion? Certainly today there are still tiresome notions that someone who takes clothes seriously can’t be taken seriously themselves.

The model Elizabeth Cowell wearing a Digby Morton suit, photographed by Miller in London, 1941

©LEE MILLER ARCHIVES, ENGLAND 2025, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, LEEMILLER.CO.UK

All the above were factors, no doubt, although Miller also wrote herself out of the story when she stopped taking photographs from the early 1950s onwards. (She died in 1977.) It’s said this was down to the trauma of her war experiences. Yet there’s also a snippy quote from her husband, the artist Roland Penrose, that appears in Whitney Chadwick’s 2017 book The Militant Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism. “Of course the women were important,” he said, “but it was because they were our muses.” They were, he declared, “not artists”.

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How delicious, then, that his wife’s legacy should be proving so much greater than his own. She is not only the star of this one-woman show at the Tate, but was also the subject of a biopic, Lee — starring Kate Winslet — last year. Miller is now recognised as a personification of the fact that the once competing notions of artist and muse don’t have to be a contradiction in terms. But also that a fashion plate can transcend the two-dimensional.

Lee Miller is at Tate Britain, London, until February 15 and at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris from April 3 to July 26, 2026, tate.org.uk; mam.paris.fr