Introduction to Lee Miller
Lee Miller is currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the Britain Museum. The largest retrospective of the groundbreaking photographer to ever take place in Great Britain runs from October 2 to February 15, 2026. Miller began modeling at the end of the 1920s and posed for legendary photographers such as Edward Steichen and George Huyingen-Huene.
The Accidental Model
Elizabeth "Lee" Miller was born in Poughkeepsia, New York in 1907, and at the age of 18 drew an early interest in art and Europe to study lighting, costumes and design at a theater school. A year later, she returned to the USA and moved to New York City, where she drained theater, drawing and studying painting. Soon afterwards she became one of the most sought-after models in New York, only by chance, as Condé Nast, the editor of Vogue magazine, saved her from being run over by a car.
Golden Couple of Surrealism
In 1929 Miller returned to Paris, where she became a student, muse, lover, and employee of the artist and photographer Man Ray. Together they made the technology of solarization one of their aesthetic brands. Miller founded her own photographic studio and established herself as an artist.
Making Art in the Desert
After leaving Ray, Miller married her first husband in 1934, the Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, and moved to Cairo with him. There she applied her surrealistic eye to photograph the natural landscape of Egypt, which led to some of her most famous works of art, such as "Portrait of Space".
War Photography through the Eye of a Surrealist
In 1937 Miller returned to Paris, where she met her second husband, the British surrealistic painter Roland Penrose, with whom she later had a son. The couple settled in London, and with the outbreak of the Second World War, Miller decided to use her photographic skills as a war correspondent for Vogue magazine. She traveled through England and Europe and was on the front, taking photos that merged photojournalism with art when her surrealistic sensitivity informed the frame of her shots.
The Woman in Hitler’s Bathtub
Miller was also praised for choosing little moments that a man might have missed. One of her most famous photos shows her swimming in Hitler’s bathtub in Munich on the same day when the Nazi dictator in Berlin committed suicide. It was taken in Hitler’s Munich apartment after documenting the freed Dachau concentration camp. Miller was more of empathy than the desire to aesthetize, and her photos of death and destruction and human suffering, which she experienced, kept her shocking strength more than seven decades later.
Friends with Picasso
Lee Miller shared close friendships with several of her artist colleagues, including Pablo Picasso. She took almost 1,000 photos of him in the four decades, and he painted her six times. Miller’s son Antony Penrose wrote a children’s book about his childhood experiences with the artist entitled "The Boy Who Bit Picasso".
A Farewell to Photojournalism
Miller was deeply affected by what she saw and documented during the war, and suffered from depression and alcoholism after her return to England. She finally gave up photography and converted her creativity to cook gourmet meals for her friends and family. Lee Miller died of cancer in 1977 at the age of 70. Her transparent influence and her inheritance, both as an artist and as a war reporter, brought her an important place in the history of photography of the 20th century.
